The first question:
Osho,
In love as well as in meditation, the moment of dissolving, disappearing, is so tremendously beautiful. Is it possible for a man who is still not egoless, not enlightened, to encounter death consciously and to welcome and enjoy it the same way? You are everywhere. But after we will have died, shall we find ourselves in such a state that it will be possible for us to remain attuned to you whether you are in the body or not? Would you please talk on death?
It is a significant question, and very urgent too. It is from Ma Ananda Shefali. She is a very, very old woman, and she will be facing death sooner or later. And it is good to prepare, it is good to go ready in death.
The first thing to be understood about death is that if you have known love, you have known death; if you have known meditation, you have known death. Death does not bring anything new. It is new only for those who have not loved and who have not meditated.
Shefali need not be afraid; she has been deeply in meditation and she has loved intensely. She’s the old woman I was talking about just a few days ago, who has become like a child, whose child is born, who is no longer a camel and no longer a lion, who has become the child. She has forgotten her body; the body does not matter. Only the body ages. The body lives in time, the innermost core is always beyond time; it is never born and never dies. The body is born and the body dies. The mind is constantly being born and constantly going in death, but there is a witness inside you who goes on watching the whole play. That witnessing is your real being. It simply watches: it watches birth, it watches love, it watches meditation, it watches death. The only quality there is, is one of witnessing, pure mirroring. It simply mirrors whatever happens.
Shefali need not be afraid. I am absolutely happy with her work on herself. She has been of great courage. To become a child again needs guts – it needs guts because the whole world will be laughing at you. The whole world will think you have gone mad. You will not find support anywhere; you will lose your respectability. People will start avoiding you. That’s what happened to Shefali. When she went back to Holland, she wrote to me: “It is strange, friends are avoiding me. People whom I have known my whole life simply try not to come across me. And I have brought such joy to them, and I have brought an open heart.” But who wants an open heart? Who wants joy? People are searching for misery. People hoard misery, people cling to their hell. They avoid anything that can bring joy to them as long as they can. They always find alibis, rationalizations. Bliss is condemned, misery is respected.
Whenever you see a really blissful man, the idea arises in you: “Has he gone mad?” because the so-called sane are never happy. Sanity has become almost synonymous with misery, a long face, sadness, seriousness. Sanity has become synonymous with a loaded feeling – one is dragging oneself somehow, and dragging for nothing, and there is nowhere to reach except death. Sanity has become synonymous with the idea that life is meaningless, that to be joyous one has to be a fool.
It really needs courage to go against this whole crowd of the world, this miserable crowd. Nobody knows the ways of joy; nobody dances, nobody sings. And suddenly you burst into a song! They all feel shocked: “Something has gone wrong.” They all start improving upon you, they all start advising you. They are all together against you. You are dangerous; the fear arises in the mind of the crowd: “Who knows? You may be right.” The doubt arises and if you are right, then they are all wrong. This is unacceptable. You have to be wrong, only then can they feel safe that they are right. Hence, they crucified Jesus.
Christians paint Jesus as sad and miserable. If he had really been that type of man, nobody would have bothered to crucify him. People would have loved him, respected him. People would have declared him a saint. But he was a celebrating man, he was celebrating the small things of life – drinking, feasting, meeting friends. He was bringing a different quality to religion. That was unacceptable, that could not be tolerated; they had to crucify him. They had to shut him up, they had to tell him to be quiet. He was so dangerous that to allow him to remain alive was risky. He had to be destroyed. And then they created a Jesus of their own, as they would have liked the real Jesus to be: sad, miserable, on the cross. It is not just an accident that Christianity has taken the cross as the symbol, death as a symbol, a crucified man as a symbol. It makes you sad.
When you go in a church, the whole atmosphere is sad. The atmosphere is that of a cemetery. It is bound to be so: the church is created around the cross, not around Christ – remember. So I call Christianity “Crossianity,” not Christianity. The space that is created in church is around the cross. Take the cross away and Christianity will disappear. Let Christ dance and Christianity will disappear. Let him have a flute, let him play, let him sing, and all your bishops and archbishops and popes and priests will be shocked: “What is this man doing?” They will crucify him again. They can only believe in a crucified life, they can only believe in a corpse. They are against life, they are antilife.
The people who decided that Jesus should be crucified were also bishops and priests and archbishops. They were not called bishops and they were not called priests and they were not called popes – they were called rabbis – but they were the same kind of people, no difference at all.
Shefali has been courageous, and one who is courageous in life will be courageous in death too. She has learned that to be courageous is the only way to be. No need for her to be afraid; she can go into death dancing. Death will only reveal that which has been revealed in love and in meditation; it will reveal it more profoundly, that’s all. What has been just a glimpse in meditation and love will become absolute reality in death. Death is the highest kind of love and the highest kind of meditative energy.
If one knows how to die, death is transformed. You are not destroyed; you destroy death when you know how to die. Smiling, a laughter in your being, welcoming – death is not there. It is only God, your beloved coming to you. It is a misunderstanding when you call it death. Death, as such, exists not: one simply changes the body and the journey continues. Death, at the most, is an overnight stay in a caravanserai. In the morning, you go again. Life continues.
Death is a rest. Death is not death at all: you are not destroyed. Life cannot be destroyed; life is eternal, death is just an episode in it. And death is not against life either; it is complementary to life. It is a rest, it is a pause. You have been singing so much, you need a little rest. Your throat is tired, your vocal chords are tired. You have been dancing so much. For seventy, eighty years you have been dancing; your legs are tired, you would like to have a little relaxation. Death allows you that relaxation. You have been laughing and living and loving. Death gives you a chance to revive again, death vitalizes you; it does not destroy. Death is nonexistential. It is just like deep sleep: a little longer, a little deeper, but just like sleep.
And if you have loved, then your love remains. If you have meditated, your meditation remains. Whatever you have gained in the inner world remains, whatever you have been hoarding in the outer world is gone. Death can only take that which you possess. Death cannot take that which you are. Money you possess; it will be taken. Power you possess; it will be taken away. Meditation you don’t possess. It is not a thing to be possessed by you, it is a quality of your being, it is you. Love you don’t possess; it is not a possession, it is being. The interior wealth will go with you; the exterior wealth will be taken away because the exterior belongs to the body. The body will fall, and the whole exterior world will fall with it and will disappear with it.
Shefali can go happily. When death comes, she can go dancing, praying. She will find the beloved in it.
Her fear is also true: she’s afraid that she is not yet egoless. That is the beginning of egolessness – to feel “I am not yet egoless.” The egoists never feel that; they think they are egoless. It is the feeling: “I am still with the ego” that gives the first hint, the first ray of the morning sun.
She says, “I’m not yet enlightened.” That is the beginning of enlightenment. That is the first feel, the first experience. The “I” is disappearing. When the “I” has disappeared completely, enlightenment happens.
My feeling about Shefali is that her death will become her satori, her samadhi. I have been closely watching her progress toward inner being; just a very, very small distance is left. If she can accept death totally, that distance will be destroyed; she will take the quantum leap.
These are the three points to become enlightened: one is meditation, another is love, the third is death. And death is the greatest because death is the most natural. Love may happen, may not happen. It is not an inevitability. Millions of people decide to live without love. They live but they never love; so it is not a necessary phenomenon, it can be avoided. And meditation, you have to go into it, you have to make an effort, you have to search and seek. It is arduous; very few people go on that adventure. Love is more natural in that sense because it is something built into your being. Meditation is not so inbuilt. People miss even love, so what to say about meditation? Even fewer people go in the direction of meditation.
But death is inevitable; you cannot avoid it, you cannot choose it. It is there. Each and everyone has to go through it. It is absolute, there is no shirking. All that you can do is either go into it dancing or go into it reluctant, clinging to life. If you are reluctant, you will miss the experience of death. If you go joyously, you will have the experience of death. To miss the experience of death is to miss God because in death, love and meditation bloom automatically. Death takes your body away; suddenly ninety percent of your life evaporates. Death takes your mind away; then the remaining ten percent is also gone. Only the witness is left. This is what meditation is. Death takes all your attachments away, all your lusts away, and when all lust and all attachments are gone, love energy is pure. It is no longer a relationship; it becomes a state of being. Death simply cleanses your love and your meditativeness. Your awareness and your love are both bathed, and they come out absolutely clean and purified in death. If you go joyously, death can become your samadhi. It can become, certainly, to Shefali.
And she asks, “Is it possible for a man who is still not egoless…to encounter death consciously and to welcome and enjoy it the same way? You are everywhere. But after we will have died, shall we find ourselves in such a state that it will be possible for us to remain attuned to you whether you are in the body or not?” Death makes no difference. Death is absolutely immaterial. If you have loved me, if you have been in tune with me, you will remain in tune with me. Death will simply make it more intense because the barriers will be taken away.
The body is a barrier, the mind is a barrier; when all the barriers disappear, there will be great melting. And the disciple comes to know his first experience of God as melting into the master. That is the privilege of a disciple. Then the second melting happens into God. The first is melting into the master because the master has been a god to the disciple, the master has been a symbol of the divine. The first experience will be of melting into the master, becoming one with the master; the second experience will be melting into God. And this is easier.
To melt from you directly into God is difficult. The enormity of it is such that you may shrink back. You need a christ between you and God because the christ is human and divine; that is the dual nature of the christ or the master. He is like you, you can hold his hand. Once you hold his hand, slowly, slowly you find that his hand is disappearing and you have entered unknowingly into the enormous, into the infinite. But by that time you cannot shrink back, by that time you have already tasted; you are drunk.
God is like an ocean; you may feel afraid. The master is like a small spring; you need not be afraid. You can dance with the spring, you can let the spring fall on you, you can allow the showering. But in that very showering, slowly, slowly you will be gone. And then you will be ready to go into the ocean, into the enormous, into the infinite.

The second question:
Osho,
Do you ever commit mistakes? And if you do, what is your greatest mistake in life?
I don’t commit anything else; I only commit mistakes. I live through them, I survive through them. And I don’t like small things; I am simply against the small scale. I only love great things.
And you ask me, “What is your greatest mistake in life?” Giving sannyas to you. Now I have fifty thousand alive mistakes moving around the world. I will stand with them and fall with them. Krishnamurti is far safer; he stands on his own. He has not committed a single mistake in giving initiation to anybody.
I go on initiating people. Each time I give initiation to a person it will depend: if he becomes enlightened, then I was not wrong; if he does not become, I was wrong. What will the criterion be of whether I committed a mistake in giving initiation to a person or not? Only one: if he becomes enlightened, then I was right in initiating him. If he does not become enlightened, then I was wrong, I initiated the wrong person.
But I am not worried about mistakes. I am going to commit even more and more and more. Who cares? Even if one person becomes enlightened out of thousands of sannyasins, it is a great blessing to the world. And remember, the same is the way of existence.
Do you know that a single male can populate the whole earth? He has so many seeds of human beings – a single male! In a single lovemaking, the male releases millions of seeds. Actually he will become father of, at the most, a dozen children, but he could have become a father of millions of children. The whole population of the earth today could be fathered by a single man.
A single tree brings millions of seeds. All those seeds are not going to become trees, but existence is always working through abundance. Existence is a spendthrift, it is not a miser. It knows that only a few seeds will become a tree, so what is the point of making so many seeds? It makes millions of seeds. The whole of life is an overflowing life, it is not a miserly phenomenon. Existence is very indulgent. Even if a single human being becomes enlightened, I am immensely fulfilled. The remaining ones will prove my mistakes. They will remain as mistakes, but that risk has to be taken.
The moment you trust me… You don’t know, you are not even aware that I have trusted you more than you have trusted me. I have risked more than you have risked. You have nothing to risk, really. When you say “I surrender,” what have you got to surrender? Except misery, what have you got? Anxieties, anguish, agonies – what else have you got to surrender? Your darkness, your hell – what else have you got to surrender? What risk are you taking? You think that you are taking a great risk in trusting me. You have nothing to lose. Really, I am taking a risk with you.
Christ took the risk when he accepted those twelve apostles, and he must still be thinking, “Why did I accept those twelve apostles?” If he had not accepted those fellows, there would have been no church, no Christianity and all that nonsense. Buddha must be thinking again and again, “Why did I accept so many people as my bhikkus, as my disciples? They created a great nuisance.” But that risk has to be taken.
It is good that Jesus took the risk. Without it, it is certain there would have been no church and there would have been no wars between Christians and Mohammedans and there would have been none of the ugliness that the Christian church has been doing down the ages. But there would have been no Eckhart either and no Francis either, no Jakob Boehme either. Out of the whole church history, even if one Meister Eckhart is born it is enough, it is worth taking the risk. If Buddha had not risked, had not committed the mistake of initiating people, there would have been no Bodhidharma, no Mahakashyapa, no Nagarjuna, no Vimalkirti – and the world would have been immensely poorer.
Yes, there have been wrong things, millions of wrong things, but a single phenomenon like Bodhidharma is enough to counterbalance. All those million wrongs are nothing; a single Bodhidharma is enough.
You ask me what my greatest mistake is. That is not only my greatest mistake, that has always been the greatest mistake of all the masters. They initiate people and they take the risk. Now it depends on you. This is what I call commitment; now this is your commitment to become enlightened, this is your commitment that you have to grow. Don’t remain stuck, start moving. You have a great destiny. You are entitled to miracles; don’t be satisfied with small things. You can possess the whole, so don’t be contented with small things and tiny things – a certificate, a medal, a degree. Don’t be stupid. Be intelligent and work diligently. Go on hammering yourself so all that is wrong is chiseled out. You will have to pass through fire. That’s why I have chosen the orange color, the color of fire: you will have to pass through fire. But only those who pass through fire become pure gold.
Let me be your alchemy. Allow me to change your baser metal into pure gold. It is a risky game. The greater possibility is always of failure: the higher you aim, the more the possibility of failure. If you want to become a rich man, you can become easily. If you want to become a politician, you can become easily; intelligence is not needed.
I have heard…

A politician had a tumor in the head; it was operated upon. When they were removing the tumor, they felt that the whole brain had to be cleaned because the tumor had affected the whole brain system. So they took out the whole brain. The cleansing was going to take a few days. And it is an old story – in those days the anesthesia was not so strong.
The next day the politician was lying in bed. A man came and said, “What are you doing here? You have been chosen the prime minister of the country!”
He heard it, almost in a sleep – but when you hear that you have become the prime minister, no anesthesia can work. He simply jumped out of the bed and started to leave. The doctor said, “Where are you going? Your brain is not yet back in the skull.”
The man said, “Now I won’t need it. I have become the prime minister!”

If you want to become a politician you don’t need much intelligence; in fact, the less the better. You will succeed far more easily. But if you want to become enlightened you will have to put all that you have at stake. You will have to become an intense flame of intelligence, of awareness. This is the commitment. I have risked with you, you have to risk with me. This commitment can grow into a great flowering: it all depends on you. Whether what I am doing is a mistake or not will be proved by you. Now it is beyond my hands. This is my trust in you.

The third question:
Osho,
What is love? Why am I so afraid of love? Why does love feel like an unbearable pain?
Meditate on these lines of Raymond John Baughan:
What is required of us in our time is that we go down into uncertainty, where what is new is old as every morning, and what is well-known is not known as well. That we go down into the most human where living men have vanished and the music of their meaning has been trapped and sealed. What is asked of us in our time is that we break open our blocked caves and find each other. Nothing less will heal the anguished spirit, nor release the heart to act in love.
You ask, “What is love?” It is the deep urge to be one with the whole, the deep urge to dissolve I and thou into one unity. Love is that because we are separated from our own source. Out of that separation, the desire arises to fall back into the whole, to become one with it. If you pull a tree out of its soil, if you uproot it, the tree will feel a great desire to be rooted back into the soil because that was its real life. Now it is dying; separate, the tree cannot exist. It has to exist in the earth, with the earth, through the earth. That’s what love is.
Your ego has become a barrier between you and your earth: the whole. Man is suffocated, he cannot breathe, he has lost his roots. He is no longer nourished. Love is a desire for nourishment. Love is getting roots in existence. And the phenomenon is easier if you fall into the polar opposite. That’s why man is attracted toward woman, the woman is attracted toward man. Man can find his earth through the woman, he can become earthed again through the woman, and the woman can become earthed through the man. They are complementary. Man alone is half, in a desperate need to be whole. Woman alone is half. When these two halves meet and mingle and merge, for the first time one feels rooted, grounded. Great joy arises in the being.
It is not only the woman that you get rooted in; it is through the woman that you get rooted in God. The woman is just a door, the man is just a door. Man and woman are doors into God. The desire for love is the desire for God. You may understand it, you may not understand it, but the desire for love really proves the existence of God. There is no other proof. Because man loves, God is. Because man cannot live without love, God is. The urge to love simply says that alone we suffer and die; together we grow, are nourished, fulfilled, contented.
You ask, “What is love? Why am I so afraid of love?” And that’s why one is afraid of love too – because the moment you enter the woman, you lose your ego. The woman enters the man and loses her ego.
Now this has to be understood: you can be rooted in the whole only if you lose yourself. There is no other way. You are attracted toward the whole because you are feeling unnourished, and then when the moment comes to disappear into the whole, you start feeling very much afraid. A great fear arises because you are losing yourself. You shrink back. This is the dilemma. Every human being has to face it, encounter it, go through it, understand it, and transcend it. You have to understand that both things are arising out of the same thing. You feel it would be beautiful to disappear: no worry, no anxiety, no responsibility. You will become part of the whole, as trees are and the stars are. Just the idea is fantastic; it opens doors, mysterious doors into your being, it gives birth to poetry, it is romantic. But when you actually go into it, then the fear arises: “I am going to disappear and who knows what will happen next?”
Remember the river listening to the whisper of the desert – hesitant, wants to go beyond it, wants to go in search of the ocean, feels that there is a desire and there is a subtle feeling and certainty and conviction that “My destiny is to go beyond.” No visible reason can be supplied, but there is an inner conviction that “I am not to end here. I have to go searching for something bigger.” Something deep down says, “Try, try hard and transcend this desert.” And then the desert says, “Listen to me: the only way is to evaporate into the winds. They will take you, they will take you beyond the desert.”
The river wants to go beyond the desert, but the question is very natural: “Then what is the proof and guarantee that the winds will allow me to become a river again? Once I have disappeared, I will not be in control in any way. Then what is the guarantee that I will again become the same river, the same form, the same name, the same body? And who knows? And how should I trust the winds that once I have surrendered to them, they will allow me to become separate again?”
That is the fear of love. You know, you are convinced that without love there is no joy, without love there is no life, without love you are hungry for something unknown, unfulfilled, empty. You are hollow, you don’t have anything. You are just a container without the content. You feel the hollowness, the emptiness and the misery of it. And you are convinced that there are ways that can fulfill you. But when you come close to love, a great fear arises, doubt arises. If you relax, if you really go into it, will you ever be able to come back again? Will you be able to protect your identity, your personality? Is it worth taking such a risk? And the mind decides not to take such a risk because at least you are – undernourished, unfed, hungry, miserable – but at least you are.
Disappearing into some love, who knows? You will disappear, and then what is the guarantee that there will be joy, there will be bliss, there will be God? It is the same fear that a seed feels when it starts dying into the soil. It is death, and the seed cannot conceive that there will be life arising out of death.
Love is death, and lovers cannot comprehend that this death is only death on this side; on the other side is the real birth. That’s why I said yesterday – Vidya’s mother had asked what a guru can do to you, and I told you – “He can undo you and he can redo you.”
To be with a master is a great love affair. You will have to allow him to undo you. That is painful. And fear will arise and doubt will arise, and you will escape many times, and you will say, “This is not the thing to do.” The mind will say, “What are you getting into? For what? Save yourself and escape.” And the mind will give a thousand and one reasons to escape. The mind is very clever in inventing reasons, it is a rationalizer. Where no reason exists, it creates, and those reasons will appeal to you because they will appeal to the ego.
This is the misery, the dilemma, the anguish: man wants to love and man is afraid to love. Unless you understand it and you go in spite of the fear, you will not be able to love. That’s what trust is. In spite of the fear, going into a thing is trust.

The fourth question:
Osho,
Have your Simons, Peters, Pauls etc. already started establishing a church for non-smelling camels?
They need not. I won’t allow that. I am doing that myself because the last time the Pauls and the Peters were allowed to create the church, they messed it up completely. This time I am to create my church myself; Peters and Pauls won’t be allowed to create it. That will be far better.
Christ was not unaware of the Eastern ways. He had been in the East, he had learned the wisdom of the East; he had known truth here, on this soil – in India.
Christianity has not got the whole story about Jesus. Their story starts when he was thirty and ends when he was thirty-three: only a three-year record. What happened to the thirty years? Where was Jesus? He was traveling in Egypt, in India, in Tibet. He was working hard, he was finding ways and means to enter his own being. When he returned to his own people, he had become almost a foreigner – the same way as my sannyasins will feel back in the West. You will become a foreigner there. In fact, now to be a foreigner will be your destiny. If you are in India you will be a foreigner, if you are in England you will be a foreigner, if you are in America you will be a foreigner. Joining hands with me, you have become a foreigner. I am a foreigner, an outsider, not part of this mad world.
When Jesus went back to his own people, to the Jews, he had become almost a foreigner. They could not understand what he was talking about. It was not part of their tradition, although he was quoting from the tradition. But the meaning that he was giving to the quotes was totally strange. Although he was using the names of Moses and Ezekiel, those were just names. They were only the container; the content was totally different. The content was not Jewish; it was Buddhist, it was basically Buddhist. He was pouring Buddhist wine into Jewish bottles, and if Jews became angry, it was natural. And he could not live long; otherwise he would have created his own church. A three-year ministry is not much. He was very young, thirty-three, when he was crucified; he did not have enough time. Buddha created his own church.
That’s the reason why very few people have become enlightened through the Christian church. They can be counted on the fingers. They are very few and far between. It is very rare: centuries pass, then one Eckhart or one Francis. Buddha created his own church; he lived a long life, he lived eighty-four years. He became enlightened when he was thirty-five; he had fifty years to work. He created his own church.
When a church is created by a Buddha or a Christ, it has a different quality. When a church is created by a Peter and Paul, it is created by Tom and Dick. It can’t have that quality. This time I’m not going to allow that. The Peters and the Pauls can rest, they need not be worried. Whatever is happening here is happening according to me, absolutely according to me, so don’t throw the responsibility on others. I am responsible – for good, for bad. Whatever happens here, I am responsible; I am totally and absolutely responsible.
And it is easy for your mind to criticize my sannyasins. It is difficult to criticize me. So you jump on my poor sannyasins; it is easy for you to criticize them. If you want to criticize me, criticize me; don’t find scapegoats. I always like a direct communication, a direct dialogue. There is no Paul here and no Peter, and whatever my sannyasins are doing, they are simply obeying my orders. So if you have to find faults, find faults with me. Never find faults with my sannyasins; they have no responsibility in it. They are simply obedient, they are doing whatever is said. Whatever is given to them, they do it. They do it with totality, with intensity. That is part of their growth work.
But don’t call names. Don’t say that the Peters and Pauls, et cetera, have already started establishing a church. No, I have started it. The church starts when a master initiates. Initiate a single man and the church has started. The church exists in the relationship between the master and the disciple; it does not exist in the temples and the churches and the organizations. It exists between the master and the disciple. It is a very intimate phenomenon. Its vibrations will be felt all over the earth, sooner or later; it will go on becoming a tidal wave.
The church in itself is not wrong. Who is behind the church? That is the basic thing to be remembered. Christianity went very wrong because of Peter and Paul. Buddhism never went that wrong. A few things are going to be wrong; they have to be accepted, that is the nature of things. When the water falls – the rainwater – it is pure, it is distilled water, but the moment it falls on the soil it will become muddy.
When Buddha speaks it is pure rainwater, distilled water, the purest, but when it falls into your ears it becomes muddy. It is natural, it has to be accepted. And when Buddha is gone, of course there is more and more mud, more and more mud. But even if a small part of Buddha’s message remains hidden in the mud, it is worth carrying the mud on your heads, it is worth carrying that mud in your heart because that small fragment of truth can transform you. Truth is never small. Truth cannot be small. It may be very atomic, but its explosion is always infinite.
I am going to create my own church. Sannyas is the beginning of it, and I want to create it according to me. So whatever you feel is not according to you, criticize me, encounter me directly.

The fifth question:
Osho,
When you talk about love, tears immediately start running. Please say something about it.
Tears are the greatest possible prayer. Don’t worry about analyzing them, don’t try to interpret them; they are beyond interpretation and beyond analysis. Words will not be adequate to say anything about tears. Tears come from a deeper source than words. And if tears are coming, all that is needed is not to think about them but to allow them, to give them an intensity, to give them a kind of totality. You will understand those tears only when you are not hesitant about going into them, when you are not somehow holding yourself back. Go into them utterly. Become tears, and when tears come, enjoy.
You are overflowing. If tears don’t come while thinking of love, then you were not thinking about love. If tears don’t come while thinking of God, then your thinking is futile, impotent. If, listening to me, your heart does not start overflowing with tears, then you were listening only through the head – which is not listening. You have been hearing but not listening. When you listen, the heart will start dancing. And the heart has only one way to express itself, and that way is the way of tears.
Meditate on these lines of an anonymous poet:
Sing until your breath crackles to the last.
Note what is caught upon the passing wind.
Laugh until the pains squeeze authority
into chaotic blasts, and then into puny puffs.
Cry until the peak of your tears,
like the pure tips of a wave before it folds into the gulping sea.
Ah, but love when your heart beats
the beat of nights full of daffodils.
For then you are.
If you can allow your tears totality, then you are. My message is of laughter and tears. It looks contradictory, but it is not. Deep down in your being, laughter and tears are joined together; they are part of one energy. If you laugh long, tears will come. If you go on crying, you will suddenly see the change – one moment a sudden change – and laughter has entered you. See this polarity. Go into tears as deeply as possible until tears become laughter. Then you have really gone to the very end. From that end, the wheel moves; when you are laughing, laugh so deeply and so totally, so wildly, that laughter turns into tears and your eyes start raining. Then you will know that all paradoxes are only on the surface, deep down they are one, laughter and tears are one. And when your prayer is of laughter and tears, it is true prayer.
You need not be worried about what it is. It is a mystery. It has to be lived, known, seen. Through knowing it, through seeing it, through living it, you will understand it. There is no other way of understanding it.

The sixth question:
Osho,
I'm able to feel the divine breath in a sunset, in a tree, in a bird flying, but I'm incredibly afraid to open myself to human beings, to the concrete people around me. I can accept the divine only beyond the human level. Sometimes I feel it is really a problem. Please help me to face this point.
It is always simple to love abstract things. It is simpler to love humanity than human beings because by loving humanity you are not risking anything. A single human being is far more dangerous than the whole of humanity. Humanity is a word; there is no corresponding reality to it. A human being is a reality, and when you come across reality there are going to be good times, bad times, pain, pleasure, ups and downs, highs and lows, agonies and ecstasies. Loving humanity, there will be no ecstasy and no agony. In fact, loving humanity is a way of avoiding human beings. Because you can’t love human beings, you start loving humanity just to deceive yourself. Avoid abstractions.
The second thing is that it is certainly easier to love a tree because while loving a tree, the tree is almost passive, it does not respond. Loving a tree is just an imagination game on your part. It is easy; whatever you want to make out of it you can. The tree is blowing in the wind, and you can think that she is calling you, she is spreading her hands toward you, she is welcoming you – and the tree is blissfully unaware of you. Whenever you go to the tree, you can always project your imagination on it. You don’t yet know the being of the tree because you don’t even know your own being. To understand a tree will be more difficult because a tree is less evolved. There is a bigger gap between you and the tree. How can you bridge it?
There is not so big a gap between you and your neighbor. You are contemporaries, equals, existing on the same plane, or almost the same plane. Understanding is easier, but you say that there you don’t feel at ease. Where understanding is easier, what is the problem? You cannot project. Where there is no possibility of understanding, you are free to project; you can love a rock.
In America they are selling rocks in beautiful boxes. Somebody has sent me a rock. It is an ordinary rock; it costs ten dollars. The package is beautiful, and with it come printed instructions on how to love it, how to make it a pet, how to take care of it. The booklet that accompanies it says it is very temperamental; you will have to take care. This is a game you can play, and if you project, the rock will be felt to be responding. You can hold the rock in your hands and if you are really imaginative, of a poetic nature, you will feel the rock is sending vibes. It is saying, “Hi, how are you? I love you, and I am feeling so immensely good in your hand.” And this is simply you: it is a monologue, it is not a dialogue. The rock is simply unaware of you, but you can play the game.
With concrete human beings, it is difficult to play the game; it costs. That’s why people start loving dogs and cats, trees, rocks. They want to love, but they want love to be non-risky. To love a dog is non-risky, to love a woman is very risky. She is not just there so that you can go on projecting, she is not like a white screen that you can project anything on and she will dance to your tune – and when you come home she will wag her tail. Not necessarily.

A man went to his psychiatrist and said, “What is happening? I am in trouble. When I got married just one year ago, my wife used to come with my slippers and my dog used to bark. Now it is just the opposite: my dog comes with the slippers and my wife barks!”
The psychiatrist said, “But I don’t understand. You are getting the same services. What is the problem?”

With a human being, sometimes there is barking and sometimes there is wagging of the tail, and sometimes the wife is angry. And when a woman is angry, she is really angry. No man can be that angry because man is always halfhearted. He is neither total in his love nor total in his anger He is calculating; he thinks of what to do and what not to do. He is intellectual, he is hung up in the head. A woman lives without the head. That’s her beauty too, and also the agony of living with her. She’s so graceful, so round, so soft – all because the head is not calculating. She lives through the heart, is more instinctive, is more animal-like. When she loves you, she loves you. She is ready to sacrifice herself. She can die for you; she will not hesitate a single moment. But when she is angry, she can kill you. She will not hesitate a single moment either.
A woman still remains total, a woman still remains primitive. And that is good, that is the only hope for humanity – that the woman is still primitive. Educate the woman, make her sophisticated, make her as clever as man, as cunning as man – as the lib movements are doing all over the world – and the world will lose the last hope. The only hope is the woman because she is still part of nature, still somehow rooted in nature, still earthly, has not yet become abstract, does not bother about abstract things. Her problems are concrete. She is a realist.

I have heard about a Chinese emperor. He wanted a painting to be made for his bedroom. In a dream he had seen a white crane flying across the full moon. He wanted that. He searched for the greatest painter. A woman was found who was the greatest painter and the emperor said, “Do it, and I will reward you, and whatever you demand I will give you. I need this painting. I have seen it in a dream – a white crane flying across the full moon.”
The woman said, “You will have to wait.”
One year passed. The emperor inquired again and again, and again and again the woman said, “Wait.”
Two years passed and the emperor said, “How long will it take? Just a small painting of the full moon and the crane passing it. How long will it take?”
The woman said, “I have been watching every full-moon night, but not a single crane has passed. And until it passes, I cannot paint it. I am not a man, I am a woman. I am a realist.”
I love the story. The woman said, “I am not a man, I cannot do it in the abstract. I cannot simply imagine it. I have to see it. Only when I have seen it happen, can I do it.”
The emperor understood the point and said, “There is no need. You will be rewarded. No need to be worried about it, but I understand your point.”

A woman is still a realist.
I have heard…

A man was laying a new concrete path. No sooner was his back turned than a crowd of children came running by, leaving footmarks all over the hardening surface. A neighbor who heard his swearing reproached him: “I thought you liked children, George.”
“I do like them,” he replied, “in the abstract, but not in the concrete.”

It is very easy to love people in the abstract; the real problem arises in the concrete. And remember, unless you love human beings – concrete, real human beings – all your love for trees and birds is bogus, just ho hum.
Only if you can love human beings will a point arise in your consciousness where you can love birds and trees and mountains too. But that is only later on. If you cannot penetrate a reality that is so close by, how can you penetrate the reality that is so far off? How can you commune with a rock? There exists no common language. Either you have to become a rock, or the rock has to become a human being. Otherwise the distance is so vast, unbridgeable. Bridge with people first.
And I know it is possible to love a tree. But that is only when you have loved human beings so deeply, so totally, that you have found trees in human beings – only then; that you have found animals in human beings – only then; that you have seen birds in human beings – only then. That is because a human being has been all these things, he still carries the marks in his unconscious, or collective unconscious. You have once been a tree, a bird, an animal, a rock. You have been all things, you have been millions of things, and all those experiences are still inside you.
The only way to connect with the outside tree is to first connect with the tree that is inside a human being. Fall in love with human beings. Take the risk, be courageous. Suffer the pains of love and the ecstasies. Go deeper into human beings, and soon you will find no human being is just a human being; a human being is a human being plus the whole of existence because a human being is the ultimate evolution. All that man has been in the past is still there, layer upon layer.
In a woman, have you not felt it sometimes that she is a cat? Have you not looked into the eyes of a woman and suddenly felt the cat inside? Without being a cat, no woman can be a woman. And you will find the bitch too. And so is the case with a man: you will find the wolf.
Man has evolved through all that exists. It is just like you were a child, then you became a young man. Do you think your childhood has completely disappeared? It is there; it has gathered a layer of youth around it, but it is there. It can be provoked. In a certain situation and milieu, you can again become a child. If you happen to see your childhood friend, suddenly you forget that you are a young man; you again become a child. You start thinking of those days, and the nostalgia and the memories and the sweet things and the joys and all that. You forget.
You may have become old. Has youth simply disappeared from you? It is there. You have gathered another layer. Just cut a tree and you will find layers upon layers in the tree. That’s how the age of the tree is judged: if it is sixty years old, then there are sixty layers. Each year a new layer arises. If you cut a rock, the rock has layers. If you go deep into human beings you will find layers, like trees and rocks. The deeper you go, the more you will find strange things happening. While making love to a woman, if you can abandon yourself totally you will be making love to animals, to birds, to trees, to rocks, to existence itself.
Each single individual is a small world, contains all, a microcosm – contains the whole, the macrocosm. And you cannot avoid human beings, you cannot say, “I will love trees, but not human beings.” Then your trees will be false, you have not approached them rightly. First, they have to be loved in human beings, first they have to be found in human beings. Only then will you know their language.

The last question:
Osho,
When a real lion meets a real master, he recognizes him and he decides to be defeated and decides to have his ego broken because he knows that this is the path and that it will lead him to more ease. But I am afraid that it is still my ego deciding for me. Please explain.
The decision to take sannyas has to be of the ego, but it is a decision to commit suicide. These two things have to be understood. When a man decides to commit suicide, life is deciding for death, in favor of death. When a man commits suicide, what happens? He has lived and found something is lacking in life, it is not worth living. He moves in the opposite direction, of death; he searches for death.
The same happens in sannyas too. It is the ego deciding to take sannyas. Sannyas means the suicide of the ego. The ego has lived and found only agonies; the ego has searched, groped in the dark, and nothing has ever happened to it – only tension, anguish, misery. The ego has lived through hell; the ego is hell.
Jean-Paul Sartre says, “The other is hell.” That is absolutely wrong; the ego is hell – not the other, but the “I” is hell. And when you have felt this in the very guts of your being, in your bones, in your blood, in your marrow – when the ego has utterly failed you – the ego decides to commit suicide. That’s what sannyas is.
But once you take sannyas, a totally different world, a totally different vision, starts in your being. You start living egolessly, and suddenly you are surprised: it was not life that was wrong, it was the ego that was wrong. Life is immensely fulfilling; it is sheer joy, it is made of the stuff called bliss. It was the ego that was a barrier and was not allowing you to live. Once you surrender even for a moment, if the window opens in that surrender, that’s what sannyas is, initiation is. Looking into the eyes of the master, for a moment you disappear, for a moment you start seeing through the eyes of the master. For a moment you are not separate, you vibrate with the master. You take his color, you take his vibration, you pulsate with him, you breathe with him. It is a single moment, but in that single moment you have come across the gap from where the door opens, and you can see a totally different world. The same world, yet from a totally different perspective.
This is initiation: looking through the master’s eyes. You have looked through your eyes and you have not found anything. Now you close your eyes and you look through the eyes of the master. This is obedience, this is surrender, this is trying to put aside your past patterns and learning something new. It is an unlearning process, unlearning as far as the ego and its ways are concerned, and a learning process as far as the ways of non-ego are concerned.
The master is one who has no ego. The disciple is one who has come to understand that the ego and its ways are false. It leads only into a cul-de-sac. The disciple is one who is ready to drop the ego and wants to know how to drop it. He has suffered long with it, he has carried the burden long. Now he’s tired of it. He wants to be unburdened. He does not know how to put it away, how to throw it. He has been clinging to it for so long that he has forgotten that it is separate from him, that it can be put aside. He comes to a man who has put his ego aside, looks into those eyes, starts trembling in a new way. A new streaming energy is felt and suddenly a link is broken between the ego and you.
This is what initiation is. It is just a beginning. Certainly, much will have to be done later on. But if you have taken one step, half the journey is complete. Yes, I say half the journey is complete because the first step is the most difficult step. All other steps are going to be the same, repetition of the same step again and again.
The question is significant. The questioner says, “When a real lion meets a real master, he recognizes him…” That is true. Camels cannot recognize a master. The camels have to be persuaded, and sometimes a camel comes to me and I persuade really hard.
Just a few days ago, I was persuading a woman really hard. I could see that she could become a lion, but that she persists in remaining a camel. I could see the potential, that just in a single step she could become a lion. Ordinarily I don’t persuade too much because persuading a person too much for sannyas can become a barrier. The person can start thinking that he or she is so important, and that’s why I am persuading. That feeling of importance can enhance the ego. But when I see that somebody is just on the verge, a push is needed, I go out of my way to give a push. But it is always moving into the unknown. One never knows how the person is going to react.
I persuaded her. She became a sannyasin, but missed the point. While looking into my eyes, she was not looking into my eyes. She was still afraid, she was clinging to the camel. A great opportunity was given to her; she missed it. I have given her a message that she can drop sannyas because really, it has not happened. She wants to remain a camel, so let her be happy as a camel. A camel cannot recognize, a camel is blind. The camel is the larva, a stagnant pool.
But a lion can recognize. That’s why it almost always happens that those who have any kind of courage immediately take the jump into sannyas. Not that they will not have to face the world, not that they will not have problems. They will have problems, but that is secondary; those problems can be tackled, that world can be faced. But when a moment arises when one has to take the risk, the lion takes the risk. The lion recognizes the master.
The camel cannot recognize; the camel has to be persuaded, goaded into sannyas. The lion can recognize and accept sannyas, ask for it, take the jump on his own accord. And in that very jump, the lion starts moving to the third stage: the child.
In surrender you become a child, you become soft, feminine, you allow the master to penetrate you deeply. You allow the master to make you pregnant. You become pregnant with the divine, and the state of the child is really a state of pregnancy. You die and you are born anew as a child, out of your own womb. It is the greatest miracle in the world – man being born out of his own womb.
But the decision is going to be of the ego. Just as suicide is the decision of life, sannyas is the decision of the ego. But once you have decided, the ego starts disappearing, the ego has committed suicide. In fact, sannyas and suicide are very similar. Suicide is a false sannyas, sannyas is a real suicide – because in suicide only the body dies and you will be born again. In sannyas the ego dies, and if you work it out totally, you may not be born again.
Enough for today.

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