THE WORLD TOUR
The Transmission of Lamp 10
Tenth Discourse from the series of 46 discourses - The Transmission of Lamp by Osho.
You can listen, download or read all of these discourses on oshoworld.com.
Osho,
To me one of the most tragic falls of man today is his valuing all the wrong things. Somewhere in the collective unconscious there must be some idea of wanting all the most beautiful things of life for free – and paying hugely for all the nonessentials. We worship the words of football players, movie stars and politicians with no appreciation whatsoever for wisdom.
This situation is so pitiful: how can one understand the beauty of cosmic payment circling back to the source when we remain in such poverty?
Would you please bring light to these blocks that man has agreed upon, buried in the unconscious?
The real values are not buried in the unconscious, the real values are revealed when you move above consciousness to the superconsciousness. What is buried in the unconscious is what is making man’s life so stupid: he may pay attention to a football player’s words, an actor’s words, and will not heed the words of the wise.
Unconsciousness is the basement of your mind. In your unconscious many things are buried which find expression through your conscious. For example, millions of people watch boxing or football matches and really get excited and they never think about what they are watching. In boxing they are watching sheer violence, but they enjoy it. This is the expression of hidden violence in you.
Society has managed man with an absolutely wrong strategy. The idea of the society has been that if something is thrown into the basement, into the darkness of the unconscious, you are finished with it. That is not the case. You are not finished with it. It will come up in a different form, and with a vengeance. And it will go on collecting.
A little anger is not much to be worried about; it comes and goes. But if you go on suppressing anger, there comes a point when it becomes like a volcano, which is just going to burst with any excuse.
Throughout the whole history suppression has been the way to keep man civilized. But in fact, it has been the cause of keeping man only superficially civilized – skin-deep civilized. Just scratch anybody a little and you will find the barbarous, the primitive, the animal, all hidden behind.
All your games are in a subtle way about satisfying your desire to win. In the movies you watch violence, you watch murder, you watch rape – and any movie which has no murder, rape, seems to have no appeal. These are essential ingredients which attract humanity, because in the unconscious they are waiting to be satisfied, and this is a vicarious way to satisfy them. You become identified with the murderer or perhaps with the murdered. You become identified with the rapist or with the raped, and a little release happens. That is your joy in watching a movie, reading a novel.
In California, the University of California has continuously for one year been studying the fact that whenever there is a boxing match, crime increases by fourteen percent for the next week, compared to the normal rate. What happens? Things which were hidden… Seeing violence in boxing, your own violence starts coming up, and that violence increases the crime rate by fourteen percent above the normal. For almost one week it remains, and then slowly it goes back down to normal.
Now, the government knows that boxing should be made a crime, something against the law. But it is not being done because boxing earns money for the people who manage it. It earns money for the government, and it seems that anything is legal if it brings money with it.
In the unconscious, the real values are not present because nobody has repressed the real values. Real values don’t need to be repressed because they are not against anybody, they do not do any harm to anybody. They are the qualities of love and compassion. But man has not experienced them because they are above the conscious mind.
You have to go beyond your conscious mind to have some glimpse of the glorious world of real values: truth, sincerity, love, friendliness, compassion, sympathy, sensitivity, appreciation of beauty, grace. All those are lined up waiting for you. But the society has put you in a struggle with the unconscious, forcing all your animal heritage into the unconscious; you have to go on continually forcing it. It is not that once forced, you are finished with it; it goes on coming up, it wants expression.
And you don’t have anything else in your life – creativity of any sort – in which your energy can be involved, so no energy is left for the unconscious to use. So it is a strange situation; all creative dimensions are closed.
The superconscious is not talked about in your educational systems. The only thing talked about is your conscious mind, and that the only way to get any poisonous thing away from you is to throw it into the unconscious.
This whole strategy is wrong. That’s why human society has come to such a wrong situation where people are living, but not truly alive – they are almost like walking corpses. From the cradle to the grave they are simply dying every day, slowly, slowly. It is a long death, a seventy-year long death. It cannot be called life because no flower blossoms, no song arises, no beauty is created.
You do not enrich life. And remember it as a basic dictum: unless you enrich life, you don’t have it. If you have life, you are bound to enrich life; you will leave life better for the world than you found it when you entered into the world. But right now it seems you will leave the world more dark, more gloomy, more sad, more miserable. The old strategy has to be abandoned, absolutely abandoned without any exception.
A few fundamentals have to be remembered. One: the unconscious has no way of releasing any content directly from itself. It has no doors, it is a basement. For anything to go out of it, it first has to come to the conscious mind. The conscious mind is the door.
In the same way the superconscious mind also has no doors. Anything to be expressed has to come to the conscious mind. The conscious mind is your ground floor; only from there can anything go out.
So the first thing is that the unconscious should be emptied. But one becomes afraid of emptying it because it is carrying all kinds of ugly features. How to empty the violence that is there: the anger, the sadness, all kinds of worries that you have dumped there because you could not manage to sort them out? How are you going to bring them to the conscious? And if they come, then what are you going to do with them?
The unconscious is not interested in the object of violence, it is interested only to throw the violence. You can just beat your pillow and you will feel immense relief. It will look a little awkward to you, that you are beating your pillow and the pillow has done no wrong to you. You think yourself very cultured, sophisticated, intelligent – and what are you doing beating the poor pillow which has not done anything? It is not a question of whether the pillow has done anything or not, but beating it will release the violence in you because violence has nothing to do with the object. Whether you beat somebody or you beat the pillow, it makes no difference to it. Whether you kill somebody or you just kill a teddy bear, it doesn’t matter. But killing has to be done.
In many primitive societies even today they make sacrifices to their gods – cows made of mud – and with great celebration. They sacrifice other animals, even men, but they are all made of mud. And the strangest thing about these primitive societies is that there is no violence, people don’t fight, they don’t have the energy to fight. They have killed somebody; the idea to kill is no longer there.
There are societies in the world where even a dream is taken to be true. There is truth to it; Sigmund Freud is proof of it. But those societies have been doing a far better psychoanalysis for thousands of years – and they are poor primitives, they don’t know what they are doing.
If somebody dreams in the night – because those people rarely dream; dreams exist because you have repressed things during the day. You wanted to look at a beautiful woman, but your wife was with you and you could not look at that woman. In the dream that woman will appear.
In those primitive societies there is no suppressive system. If somebody likes someone, he goes to the person and says, “You are beautiful and I like you very much.” The person may even be a stranger. But if somebody dreams, the first thing that happens is that the elders of the society gather, and he has to confess his dream to them.
It is a great thing that somebody has dreamed. If he has dreamed that he has insulted somebody, then he has to go to that person to apologize and bring sweets and fruits to present to him as a token of friendship because in the dream he had insulted him.
To us it will look absolutely absurd because what you do in the dream is your business; the other person does not know that you insulted him. That is not the question, that the other person does not know; the question is that you have a certain antagonism towards the person that came up in your dream, and it is better to make things clear. Go to the person to apologize, give him presents and the dream will never come again.
A king of Egypt had ordered his court and the whole kingdom that if anybody comes in his dream then death is the penalty. Now this is real absurdity. People were so afraid – but what can you do if you appear in his dream? That is really his problem; you have not gone into his dream. And he killed a few people because in spite of the warning, he saw them in his dream. Why should they disturb his sleep? And he was a monarch with all the powers over life and death; he killed people.
The whole kingdom was afraid that at any moment they could be killed for no crime. And they had nothing to do with his dream. His dream is his dream, it is his problem. But who was going to say this to him?
These primitive people are far more intelligent, far more innocent. This society – where dreams are taken as if they are real, and something has to be done consciously so that an ugly dream does not come to you and destroy your dignity – has never had any war in its whole history. Their small tribes have never fought with each other; there is no violence in that sense.
Nobody fights with anyone. If, even in a dream somebody insults you or you insult somebody, it has to be settled consciously, then it is impossible to have any violence. People are utterly simple.
The unconscious simply needs fake objects to throw its garbage at. There is no need to kill anybody: you can kill a statue, you can kill a photograph, you can burn a photograph and feel at ease. And slowly, slowly, whatever comes in your dreams or in your waking hours from the unconscious, give it a reality so that it goes out. Don’t repress it. Don’t think, “This is bad and I should not show it to anybody;” it will become a wound and finally a cancer. Release it.
In your private room you can release it in any way you want. Dynamic meditation was basically devised to help the unconscious unburden itself. The Indonesian latihan does the same.
Once the unconscious is completely clean and there is no energy wasted in repressing it, the same energy starts moving upwards because remember, that energy cannot remain static, it has to move. Now that there is no work in the unconscious, it starts moving upwards towards lighter spaces in you, and there you will find real values which make a man a man and take him beyond the animal.
Whatever you experience in the superconscious has also to be brought to the conscious and acted upon. Don’t just think great thoughts, don’t just go on experiencing beauty – let your experiences become actions, creativity. Do something about them, and as you start doing something about them you will find that deeper qualities are pouring in.
Just writing a poem may release a great source of energy. Doing any beautiful act, doing any compassionate act, sharing something that you have in abundance with somebody and your superconscious will start coming more and more to the conscious mind. Now it has got a door to move into the world.
When the superconscious is completely empty, then the collective superconscious starts dropping its great hidden treasures. And when the collective superconscious is emptied you have come to the ultimate glory, the cosmic conscious.
From this cosmic superconscious mind, each of your acts starts taking on a fragrance of divinity, of godliness. Whatever you touch becomes gold, whatever you say becomes truth. Each of your movements in life creates ripples of beauty, joy, ecstasy, which will go to the farthest ends of existence, touching millions of people who have never known you and who may never know you – but they will share your joy.
You may have felt it sometime – you are sitting, feeling good, and suddenly you become sad and you don’t know why. It is because somebody is releasing ripples of sadness just close by, and they are strong enough to have an impact on you.
Sometimes you feel just the opposite – you feel very light, weightless for no reason: you feel a freshness, a joy. You cannot even tell anybody, “I am feeling joyous;” they will think you are crazy because there is no reason to feel joy. What is the reason? You cannot give a reason because you don’t know it yourself. It is just somebody’s joy that has created a ripple that touched you. We are very sensitive beings. Like the antenna of your radio, it goes on catching every ripple that comes close to you – very subtle ripples.
Most of the time you are suffering other people’s sufferings, and just once in a while you are enjoying somebody else’s joy because the sad and the miserable are many, and the joyful, blissful are very few, very rare. If you can understand this, you will also feel a certain distance when you feel sadness. It may not have anything to do with you. When you feel a certain happiness, a certain pleasure, it may not have anything to do with you. You can keep a certain distance and you can watch these feelings – and watching these feelings will help you to find your own sources.
Man is born with great treasures, but he is also born with the whole animal heritage. Somehow we have to empty out the animal heritage and create a space for the treasure to come to the conscious and be shared, because this is one of the qualities of a treasure: the more you share it, the more you have it.
Osho,
Have you suggested that now is the time for me to live out my negative emotions because in the past I never allowed myself to show them in public? I remember a group experience, years ago, in which one of the exercises was to express, in your own way, any emotion suggested, and I was unable to express anything except anger. Maybe I really didn't even know what such emotions felt like, in a conscious way; I didn't even allow myself to admit that these emotions were there. I am trying to put together the pieces in this puzzle. Am I on track?
First remember not to misunderstand me. I have said, “Express your negative emotions;” I have not said, “Publicly.” That’s how things become distorted.
Now if you are feeling angry with someone and you start expressing your anger, the other person is not going to be a Gautam Buddha and sit silently. He is not a marble statue, he will also do something. You will express anger, he will express anger. It will create more anger in you, and anger or violence from the other side create the same, with more vengeance. And then you will feel like going into it more, because you have been told to express. Yes, I have told you to express, but I don’t mean publicly.
If you are feeling angry go to your room: lock the room, beat the pillow, stand before a mirror, shout at your own image, say things that you have never said to anybody and always wanted to say. But it has to be a private phenomenon, otherwise there is no end. Things go on moving in a circle, and we want to end them.
The moment you feel any negative emotion about anybody, that other person is not the question. The question is that you have a certain energy of anger. Now, that energy has to be diffused into the universe. You are not to repress it within yourself.
So whenever I say, “Express,” I always mean privately, in your aloneness. It is a meditation, it is not a fight. If you are feeling sad, sit in your room and feel as sad as you can – it can’t harm. Be really sad and see how long it stays. Nothing stays forever; soon it will be passing away – if you feel like crying, cry, but in your privacy. These things have nothing to do with others. Everything is your problem; why make it public? And that way it is not going to be helped, but on the contrary, it will be increased.
So every day before going to sleep, for one hour at night, sit on your bed and do all kinds of crazy things that you wanted to do, that people do when they are angry, violent, destructive. And it does not mean that you have to be destructive to very valuable things; just tear paper into small bits and throw them all over – and you know the story. And that will do. Destroy anything valueless – but everything has to be done in your privacy, so when you come out, you come fresh.
If you want to do something in public, do what I was telling you about those primitives. You can go to the person you were angry with and tell him, “In private I have been angry with you. I shouted at you, I abused you, I said ugly things to you; please forgive me. But it was all done in privacy because it was my problem; it has nothing to do with you. But in a certain way it was directed at you, and you are not aware of it, hence an apology is needed.” This has to be done in public. That will help people to help each other. And that person will not be angry. He will say, “There is no need for an apology. You have not done anything to me. And if you are feeling clean, it was a good exercise.”
But in public don’t bring your negativities, your ugliness; otherwise, you are creating bigger problems while trying to solve small problems. Be really very careful. Everything negative has to be in private, in your aloneness. And if you want to make any public statement about it – because somebody may have been in your mind with whom you were hateful, whom you killed while you were tearing the paper – go to him and humbly ask for his forgiveness.
And here you can see my differences from the so-called Western therapies. They don’t help, their relief is temporary. But once and for all, understand that every problem is yours, so it has to be solved in your privacy. Don’t wash your dirty linen in public places. There is no need. Why unnecessarily involve other people? Why unnecessarily create an image of yourself as ugly?
I am reminded of a very strange story…
There was a great conference, a world conference of psychologists, psychoanalysts, therapists and all other schools for treating man’s mind. One great psychoanalyst was reading a paper. But he could not read it because his attention was continually distracted by a young female psychoanalyst who was sitting in the front row, and an old ugly fellow who was continuously playing with her breasts. And she was not bothered at all.
He could not read his paper. He tried to hide that woman and that old man behind the paper, but he would forget which line he was reading and he got so messed up that finally he said, “It is impossible.”
The conference could not understand what was impossible and why he’s behaving in such a way – he was a very systematic thinker, and today he is talking nonsense. He reads half of one sentence and then another which has no connection with it, and then another page comes in, and now he is saying, “It is all messed up and I cannot…”
And he would not look at the woman who was sitting just in front. Somebody stood up and said, “What is the matter? Why are you making a fool of yourself?”
He said, “I am not making a fool of myself. This young lady is not doing anything, and that old ugly fellow is playing with her breasts.”
The young lady said, “But that is not your problem. You should read your paper. Even I am not taking it as my problem. It is his problem, so why should I be worried? He has a repressed sexuality; perhaps he could not get his mother’s breast for long enough. And he is still, at this age, he must be eighty… He is not doing any harm to me. It is not my problem, so why should I stop him? And it is not your problem, why should you get disturbed? It is simply his problem. He should get psychoanalyzed – and he himself is a great psychoanalyst. In fact, he is my teacher.”
But what the woman said, “It is not my problem, what he is doing,” needs a very integrated personality, a very clear-cut vision that even though he is doing something with her, the problem is his.
She continued “Why should I get disturbed? The poor fellow has been suffering from his very childhood it seems, and he has never found any opportunity – and now he is almost half in his grave. If I can give him some satisfaction, there is no harm. It does me no harm at all. But I am puzzled why you could not read your paper. You seem to be standing behind this old fellow. You also have the same problem.”
And it was a fact. That man also had the same problem, otherwise there was nothing to be worried about. He should read his paper and let the old man do what he is doing. And if the young lady is not preventing him, is not even taking note of him, it is none of his business.
If people can keep to their own problems, and don’t go on spreading them all around – because then they become magnified.
Now what this old man needed was simply a baby’s milk bottle, so in his aloneness at night he can suck lukewarm milk from the bottle and enjoy it. And in darkness, whether it is a nipple or just a rubber teat makes no difference. All that he needs is a small baby’s milk bottle every night so that he can die peacefully without any problem. But he is throwing it on a poor woman who has nothing to do with it. And not only that, somebody else who is absolutely out of the whole thing is disturbed because he also has the same problem.
Just keep your private problems to yourself. Group therapy is not of much help because whatever you do in the group you cannot do in the society. And the group cannot become your whole life; out of the group you will again be in the same trouble.
What I am giving to you is a simple method that you can do by yourself very easily. Clean your unconscious and come back into the outside world, with other people – with a softer face, cleaner eyes, more human acts.
So everything is right, just don’t misunderstand me. You have used that word public; it is not a question of public, it is your problem. Why bother the public? – they have their own problems. Let them tackle their problems in their privacy. Other than that, you are on the right track.
Express. Find a way to express it as cheaply as possible, as economically as possible, but always in your aloneness so that only you know the ugliness that you have thrown out.
Osho,
Did you have an awareness of your past lives before you were enlightened?
Yes.
Osho,
Although you were born almost enlightened, when I listen to your stories of your early life, I never get the impression that you saw yourself as a spiritual seeker. Were you looking for enlightenment, or was enlightenment a by-product of an impeccable resolve to never compromise what you felt to be true?
There are things which cannot be sought directly. The more valuable a thing is, the more indirectly you have to go into it. In fact you have to do something else that simply prepares the situation around you – in which things like enlightenment, truth, can happen.
You cannot go seeking and searching for truth. Where will you go? Kabul? Kulu-Manali? Kathmandu? Goa?…and then back home. All seekers of truth go this route and come back home looking more foolish than before. They have not found anything.
Where will you go to seek the truth? You don’t know the way, there is no map, there is no direction available. Nobody knows what, where, when it is possible to realize truth.
The real seeker of truth never seeks truth. On the contrary, he tries to clean himself of all that is untrue, unauthentic, insincere – and when his heart is ready, purified, the guest comes. You cannot find the guest, you cannot go after him. He comes to you; you just have to be prepared. You have to be in a right attitude.
I have never been spiritual in the sense that you understand the word. I have never gone to the temples or the churches, or read scriptures, or followed certain practices to find truth, or worshipped God or prayed to God. That has not been my way at all. So certainly you can say that I was not doing anything spiritual. But to me spirituality has a totally different connotation. It needs an honest individuality. It does not allow any kind of dependence. It creates a freedom for itself, whatever the cost. It is never in the crowd but alone, because the crowd has never found any truth. The truth has been found only in people’s aloneness.
So my spirituality has a different meaning from your idea of spirituality. My childhood stories – if you can understand them – will point to all these qualities in some way or other. Nobody can call them spiritual. I call them spiritual, because to me they have given all that man can aspire to.
While listening to my childhood stories you should try to look for some quality in it – not just the story but some intrinsic quality that runs like a thin thread through all of my memoirs. And that thin thread is spiritual.
Spiritual, to me, simply means finding oneself. I never allowed anybody to do this work on my behalf – because nobody can do this work on your behalf; you have to do it yourself. And you cannot do it directly either, you have to create a certain milieu in which it happens. It is a happening; enlightenment, liberation, awakening, realization – all these words point towards absolutely one thing and that is a happening.
That creates a kind of fear in many people: “If it is happening, then what are we supposed to do? Whenever it will happen, it will happen.” That is not so. It is a happening, but you can do much to prepare the ground for it to happen.
Preparing the ground may not look spiritual to those who do not understand. But it must be spiritual because the enlightenment has happened.
The end proves that whatever means were used were substantially right. It is the goal that proves that the way that was followed was right.
To me one of the most tragic falls of man today is his valuing all the wrong things. Somewhere in the collective unconscious there must be some idea of wanting all the most beautiful things of life for free – and paying hugely for all the nonessentials. We worship the words of football players, movie stars and politicians with no appreciation whatsoever for wisdom.
This situation is so pitiful: how can one understand the beauty of cosmic payment circling back to the source when we remain in such poverty?
Would you please bring light to these blocks that man has agreed upon, buried in the unconscious?
The real values are not buried in the unconscious, the real values are revealed when you move above consciousness to the superconsciousness. What is buried in the unconscious is what is making man’s life so stupid: he may pay attention to a football player’s words, an actor’s words, and will not heed the words of the wise.
Unconsciousness is the basement of your mind. In your unconscious many things are buried which find expression through your conscious. For example, millions of people watch boxing or football matches and really get excited and they never think about what they are watching. In boxing they are watching sheer violence, but they enjoy it. This is the expression of hidden violence in you.
Society has managed man with an absolutely wrong strategy. The idea of the society has been that if something is thrown into the basement, into the darkness of the unconscious, you are finished with it. That is not the case. You are not finished with it. It will come up in a different form, and with a vengeance. And it will go on collecting.
A little anger is not much to be worried about; it comes and goes. But if you go on suppressing anger, there comes a point when it becomes like a volcano, which is just going to burst with any excuse.
Throughout the whole history suppression has been the way to keep man civilized. But in fact, it has been the cause of keeping man only superficially civilized – skin-deep civilized. Just scratch anybody a little and you will find the barbarous, the primitive, the animal, all hidden behind.
All your games are in a subtle way about satisfying your desire to win. In the movies you watch violence, you watch murder, you watch rape – and any movie which has no murder, rape, seems to have no appeal. These are essential ingredients which attract humanity, because in the unconscious they are waiting to be satisfied, and this is a vicarious way to satisfy them. You become identified with the murderer or perhaps with the murdered. You become identified with the rapist or with the raped, and a little release happens. That is your joy in watching a movie, reading a novel.
In California, the University of California has continuously for one year been studying the fact that whenever there is a boxing match, crime increases by fourteen percent for the next week, compared to the normal rate. What happens? Things which were hidden… Seeing violence in boxing, your own violence starts coming up, and that violence increases the crime rate by fourteen percent above the normal. For almost one week it remains, and then slowly it goes back down to normal.
Now, the government knows that boxing should be made a crime, something against the law. But it is not being done because boxing earns money for the people who manage it. It earns money for the government, and it seems that anything is legal if it brings money with it.
In the unconscious, the real values are not present because nobody has repressed the real values. Real values don’t need to be repressed because they are not against anybody, they do not do any harm to anybody. They are the qualities of love and compassion. But man has not experienced them because they are above the conscious mind.
You have to go beyond your conscious mind to have some glimpse of the glorious world of real values: truth, sincerity, love, friendliness, compassion, sympathy, sensitivity, appreciation of beauty, grace. All those are lined up waiting for you. But the society has put you in a struggle with the unconscious, forcing all your animal heritage into the unconscious; you have to go on continually forcing it. It is not that once forced, you are finished with it; it goes on coming up, it wants expression.
And you don’t have anything else in your life – creativity of any sort – in which your energy can be involved, so no energy is left for the unconscious to use. So it is a strange situation; all creative dimensions are closed.
The superconscious is not talked about in your educational systems. The only thing talked about is your conscious mind, and that the only way to get any poisonous thing away from you is to throw it into the unconscious.
This whole strategy is wrong. That’s why human society has come to such a wrong situation where people are living, but not truly alive – they are almost like walking corpses. From the cradle to the grave they are simply dying every day, slowly, slowly. It is a long death, a seventy-year long death. It cannot be called life because no flower blossoms, no song arises, no beauty is created.
You do not enrich life. And remember it as a basic dictum: unless you enrich life, you don’t have it. If you have life, you are bound to enrich life; you will leave life better for the world than you found it when you entered into the world. But right now it seems you will leave the world more dark, more gloomy, more sad, more miserable. The old strategy has to be abandoned, absolutely abandoned without any exception.
A few fundamentals have to be remembered. One: the unconscious has no way of releasing any content directly from itself. It has no doors, it is a basement. For anything to go out of it, it first has to come to the conscious mind. The conscious mind is the door.
In the same way the superconscious mind also has no doors. Anything to be expressed has to come to the conscious mind. The conscious mind is your ground floor; only from there can anything go out.
So the first thing is that the unconscious should be emptied. But one becomes afraid of emptying it because it is carrying all kinds of ugly features. How to empty the violence that is there: the anger, the sadness, all kinds of worries that you have dumped there because you could not manage to sort them out? How are you going to bring them to the conscious? And if they come, then what are you going to do with them?
The unconscious is not interested in the object of violence, it is interested only to throw the violence. You can just beat your pillow and you will feel immense relief. It will look a little awkward to you, that you are beating your pillow and the pillow has done no wrong to you. You think yourself very cultured, sophisticated, intelligent – and what are you doing beating the poor pillow which has not done anything? It is not a question of whether the pillow has done anything or not, but beating it will release the violence in you because violence has nothing to do with the object. Whether you beat somebody or you beat the pillow, it makes no difference to it. Whether you kill somebody or you just kill a teddy bear, it doesn’t matter. But killing has to be done.
In many primitive societies even today they make sacrifices to their gods – cows made of mud – and with great celebration. They sacrifice other animals, even men, but they are all made of mud. And the strangest thing about these primitive societies is that there is no violence, people don’t fight, they don’t have the energy to fight. They have killed somebody; the idea to kill is no longer there.
There are societies in the world where even a dream is taken to be true. There is truth to it; Sigmund Freud is proof of it. But those societies have been doing a far better psychoanalysis for thousands of years – and they are poor primitives, they don’t know what they are doing.
If somebody dreams in the night – because those people rarely dream; dreams exist because you have repressed things during the day. You wanted to look at a beautiful woman, but your wife was with you and you could not look at that woman. In the dream that woman will appear.
In those primitive societies there is no suppressive system. If somebody likes someone, he goes to the person and says, “You are beautiful and I like you very much.” The person may even be a stranger. But if somebody dreams, the first thing that happens is that the elders of the society gather, and he has to confess his dream to them.
It is a great thing that somebody has dreamed. If he has dreamed that he has insulted somebody, then he has to go to that person to apologize and bring sweets and fruits to present to him as a token of friendship because in the dream he had insulted him.
To us it will look absolutely absurd because what you do in the dream is your business; the other person does not know that you insulted him. That is not the question, that the other person does not know; the question is that you have a certain antagonism towards the person that came up in your dream, and it is better to make things clear. Go to the person to apologize, give him presents and the dream will never come again.
A king of Egypt had ordered his court and the whole kingdom that if anybody comes in his dream then death is the penalty. Now this is real absurdity. People were so afraid – but what can you do if you appear in his dream? That is really his problem; you have not gone into his dream. And he killed a few people because in spite of the warning, he saw them in his dream. Why should they disturb his sleep? And he was a monarch with all the powers over life and death; he killed people.
The whole kingdom was afraid that at any moment they could be killed for no crime. And they had nothing to do with his dream. His dream is his dream, it is his problem. But who was going to say this to him?
These primitive people are far more intelligent, far more innocent. This society – where dreams are taken as if they are real, and something has to be done consciously so that an ugly dream does not come to you and destroy your dignity – has never had any war in its whole history. Their small tribes have never fought with each other; there is no violence in that sense.
Nobody fights with anyone. If, even in a dream somebody insults you or you insult somebody, it has to be settled consciously, then it is impossible to have any violence. People are utterly simple.
The unconscious simply needs fake objects to throw its garbage at. There is no need to kill anybody: you can kill a statue, you can kill a photograph, you can burn a photograph and feel at ease. And slowly, slowly, whatever comes in your dreams or in your waking hours from the unconscious, give it a reality so that it goes out. Don’t repress it. Don’t think, “This is bad and I should not show it to anybody;” it will become a wound and finally a cancer. Release it.
In your private room you can release it in any way you want. Dynamic meditation was basically devised to help the unconscious unburden itself. The Indonesian latihan does the same.
Once the unconscious is completely clean and there is no energy wasted in repressing it, the same energy starts moving upwards because remember, that energy cannot remain static, it has to move. Now that there is no work in the unconscious, it starts moving upwards towards lighter spaces in you, and there you will find real values which make a man a man and take him beyond the animal.
Whatever you experience in the superconscious has also to be brought to the conscious and acted upon. Don’t just think great thoughts, don’t just go on experiencing beauty – let your experiences become actions, creativity. Do something about them, and as you start doing something about them you will find that deeper qualities are pouring in.
Just writing a poem may release a great source of energy. Doing any beautiful act, doing any compassionate act, sharing something that you have in abundance with somebody and your superconscious will start coming more and more to the conscious mind. Now it has got a door to move into the world.
When the superconscious is completely empty, then the collective superconscious starts dropping its great hidden treasures. And when the collective superconscious is emptied you have come to the ultimate glory, the cosmic conscious.
From this cosmic superconscious mind, each of your acts starts taking on a fragrance of divinity, of godliness. Whatever you touch becomes gold, whatever you say becomes truth. Each of your movements in life creates ripples of beauty, joy, ecstasy, which will go to the farthest ends of existence, touching millions of people who have never known you and who may never know you – but they will share your joy.
You may have felt it sometime – you are sitting, feeling good, and suddenly you become sad and you don’t know why. It is because somebody is releasing ripples of sadness just close by, and they are strong enough to have an impact on you.
Sometimes you feel just the opposite – you feel very light, weightless for no reason: you feel a freshness, a joy. You cannot even tell anybody, “I am feeling joyous;” they will think you are crazy because there is no reason to feel joy. What is the reason? You cannot give a reason because you don’t know it yourself. It is just somebody’s joy that has created a ripple that touched you. We are very sensitive beings. Like the antenna of your radio, it goes on catching every ripple that comes close to you – very subtle ripples.
Most of the time you are suffering other people’s sufferings, and just once in a while you are enjoying somebody else’s joy because the sad and the miserable are many, and the joyful, blissful are very few, very rare. If you can understand this, you will also feel a certain distance when you feel sadness. It may not have anything to do with you. When you feel a certain happiness, a certain pleasure, it may not have anything to do with you. You can keep a certain distance and you can watch these feelings – and watching these feelings will help you to find your own sources.
Man is born with great treasures, but he is also born with the whole animal heritage. Somehow we have to empty out the animal heritage and create a space for the treasure to come to the conscious and be shared, because this is one of the qualities of a treasure: the more you share it, the more you have it.
Osho,
Have you suggested that now is the time for me to live out my negative emotions because in the past I never allowed myself to show them in public? I remember a group experience, years ago, in which one of the exercises was to express, in your own way, any emotion suggested, and I was unable to express anything except anger. Maybe I really didn't even know what such emotions felt like, in a conscious way; I didn't even allow myself to admit that these emotions were there. I am trying to put together the pieces in this puzzle. Am I on track?
First remember not to misunderstand me. I have said, “Express your negative emotions;” I have not said, “Publicly.” That’s how things become distorted.
Now if you are feeling angry with someone and you start expressing your anger, the other person is not going to be a Gautam Buddha and sit silently. He is not a marble statue, he will also do something. You will express anger, he will express anger. It will create more anger in you, and anger or violence from the other side create the same, with more vengeance. And then you will feel like going into it more, because you have been told to express. Yes, I have told you to express, but I don’t mean publicly.
If you are feeling angry go to your room: lock the room, beat the pillow, stand before a mirror, shout at your own image, say things that you have never said to anybody and always wanted to say. But it has to be a private phenomenon, otherwise there is no end. Things go on moving in a circle, and we want to end them.
The moment you feel any negative emotion about anybody, that other person is not the question. The question is that you have a certain energy of anger. Now, that energy has to be diffused into the universe. You are not to repress it within yourself.
So whenever I say, “Express,” I always mean privately, in your aloneness. It is a meditation, it is not a fight. If you are feeling sad, sit in your room and feel as sad as you can – it can’t harm. Be really sad and see how long it stays. Nothing stays forever; soon it will be passing away – if you feel like crying, cry, but in your privacy. These things have nothing to do with others. Everything is your problem; why make it public? And that way it is not going to be helped, but on the contrary, it will be increased.
So every day before going to sleep, for one hour at night, sit on your bed and do all kinds of crazy things that you wanted to do, that people do when they are angry, violent, destructive. And it does not mean that you have to be destructive to very valuable things; just tear paper into small bits and throw them all over – and you know the story. And that will do. Destroy anything valueless – but everything has to be done in your privacy, so when you come out, you come fresh.
If you want to do something in public, do what I was telling you about those primitives. You can go to the person you were angry with and tell him, “In private I have been angry with you. I shouted at you, I abused you, I said ugly things to you; please forgive me. But it was all done in privacy because it was my problem; it has nothing to do with you. But in a certain way it was directed at you, and you are not aware of it, hence an apology is needed.” This has to be done in public. That will help people to help each other. And that person will not be angry. He will say, “There is no need for an apology. You have not done anything to me. And if you are feeling clean, it was a good exercise.”
But in public don’t bring your negativities, your ugliness; otherwise, you are creating bigger problems while trying to solve small problems. Be really very careful. Everything negative has to be in private, in your aloneness. And if you want to make any public statement about it – because somebody may have been in your mind with whom you were hateful, whom you killed while you were tearing the paper – go to him and humbly ask for his forgiveness.
And here you can see my differences from the so-called Western therapies. They don’t help, their relief is temporary. But once and for all, understand that every problem is yours, so it has to be solved in your privacy. Don’t wash your dirty linen in public places. There is no need. Why unnecessarily involve other people? Why unnecessarily create an image of yourself as ugly?
I am reminded of a very strange story…
There was a great conference, a world conference of psychologists, psychoanalysts, therapists and all other schools for treating man’s mind. One great psychoanalyst was reading a paper. But he could not read it because his attention was continually distracted by a young female psychoanalyst who was sitting in the front row, and an old ugly fellow who was continuously playing with her breasts. And she was not bothered at all.
He could not read his paper. He tried to hide that woman and that old man behind the paper, but he would forget which line he was reading and he got so messed up that finally he said, “It is impossible.”
The conference could not understand what was impossible and why he’s behaving in such a way – he was a very systematic thinker, and today he is talking nonsense. He reads half of one sentence and then another which has no connection with it, and then another page comes in, and now he is saying, “It is all messed up and I cannot…”
And he would not look at the woman who was sitting just in front. Somebody stood up and said, “What is the matter? Why are you making a fool of yourself?”
He said, “I am not making a fool of myself. This young lady is not doing anything, and that old ugly fellow is playing with her breasts.”
The young lady said, “But that is not your problem. You should read your paper. Even I am not taking it as my problem. It is his problem, so why should I be worried? He has a repressed sexuality; perhaps he could not get his mother’s breast for long enough. And he is still, at this age, he must be eighty… He is not doing any harm to me. It is not my problem, so why should I stop him? And it is not your problem, why should you get disturbed? It is simply his problem. He should get psychoanalyzed – and he himself is a great psychoanalyst. In fact, he is my teacher.”
But what the woman said, “It is not my problem, what he is doing,” needs a very integrated personality, a very clear-cut vision that even though he is doing something with her, the problem is his.
She continued “Why should I get disturbed? The poor fellow has been suffering from his very childhood it seems, and he has never found any opportunity – and now he is almost half in his grave. If I can give him some satisfaction, there is no harm. It does me no harm at all. But I am puzzled why you could not read your paper. You seem to be standing behind this old fellow. You also have the same problem.”
And it was a fact. That man also had the same problem, otherwise there was nothing to be worried about. He should read his paper and let the old man do what he is doing. And if the young lady is not preventing him, is not even taking note of him, it is none of his business.
If people can keep to their own problems, and don’t go on spreading them all around – because then they become magnified.
Now what this old man needed was simply a baby’s milk bottle, so in his aloneness at night he can suck lukewarm milk from the bottle and enjoy it. And in darkness, whether it is a nipple or just a rubber teat makes no difference. All that he needs is a small baby’s milk bottle every night so that he can die peacefully without any problem. But he is throwing it on a poor woman who has nothing to do with it. And not only that, somebody else who is absolutely out of the whole thing is disturbed because he also has the same problem.
Just keep your private problems to yourself. Group therapy is not of much help because whatever you do in the group you cannot do in the society. And the group cannot become your whole life; out of the group you will again be in the same trouble.
What I am giving to you is a simple method that you can do by yourself very easily. Clean your unconscious and come back into the outside world, with other people – with a softer face, cleaner eyes, more human acts.
So everything is right, just don’t misunderstand me. You have used that word public; it is not a question of public, it is your problem. Why bother the public? – they have their own problems. Let them tackle their problems in their privacy. Other than that, you are on the right track.
Express. Find a way to express it as cheaply as possible, as economically as possible, but always in your aloneness so that only you know the ugliness that you have thrown out.
Osho,
Did you have an awareness of your past lives before you were enlightened?
Yes.
Osho,
Although you were born almost enlightened, when I listen to your stories of your early life, I never get the impression that you saw yourself as a spiritual seeker. Were you looking for enlightenment, or was enlightenment a by-product of an impeccable resolve to never compromise what you felt to be true?
There are things which cannot be sought directly. The more valuable a thing is, the more indirectly you have to go into it. In fact you have to do something else that simply prepares the situation around you – in which things like enlightenment, truth, can happen.
You cannot go seeking and searching for truth. Where will you go? Kabul? Kulu-Manali? Kathmandu? Goa?…and then back home. All seekers of truth go this route and come back home looking more foolish than before. They have not found anything.
Where will you go to seek the truth? You don’t know the way, there is no map, there is no direction available. Nobody knows what, where, when it is possible to realize truth.
The real seeker of truth never seeks truth. On the contrary, he tries to clean himself of all that is untrue, unauthentic, insincere – and when his heart is ready, purified, the guest comes. You cannot find the guest, you cannot go after him. He comes to you; you just have to be prepared. You have to be in a right attitude.
I have never been spiritual in the sense that you understand the word. I have never gone to the temples or the churches, or read scriptures, or followed certain practices to find truth, or worshipped God or prayed to God. That has not been my way at all. So certainly you can say that I was not doing anything spiritual. But to me spirituality has a totally different connotation. It needs an honest individuality. It does not allow any kind of dependence. It creates a freedom for itself, whatever the cost. It is never in the crowd but alone, because the crowd has never found any truth. The truth has been found only in people’s aloneness.
So my spirituality has a different meaning from your idea of spirituality. My childhood stories – if you can understand them – will point to all these qualities in some way or other. Nobody can call them spiritual. I call them spiritual, because to me they have given all that man can aspire to.
While listening to my childhood stories you should try to look for some quality in it – not just the story but some intrinsic quality that runs like a thin thread through all of my memoirs. And that thin thread is spiritual.
Spiritual, to me, simply means finding oneself. I never allowed anybody to do this work on my behalf – because nobody can do this work on your behalf; you have to do it yourself. And you cannot do it directly either, you have to create a certain milieu in which it happens. It is a happening; enlightenment, liberation, awakening, realization – all these words point towards absolutely one thing and that is a happening.
That creates a kind of fear in many people: “If it is happening, then what are we supposed to do? Whenever it will happen, it will happen.” That is not so. It is a happening, but you can do much to prepare the ground for it to happen.
Preparing the ground may not look spiritual to those who do not understand. But it must be spiritual because the enlightenment has happened.
The end proves that whatever means were used were substantially right. It is the goal that proves that the way that was followed was right.