ZEN AND ZEN MASTERS
This Very Body the Buddha 04
Fourth Discourse from the series of 10 discourses - This Very Body the Buddha by Osho.
You can listen, download or read all of these discourses on oshoworld.com.
The first question:
Osho,
Why do I seem to feel more afraid of life than of death?
Death is unknown. You cannot really be afraid of that with which you are not at all acquainted. Fear is a relationship – you have to know something to be afraid of it. Nobody is really afraid of death; whenever somebody says, “I am afraid of death” he is simply saying that he is afraid to lose life. Death is absolutely unknown. So everybody is afraid of life – it is life that is the problem, not death. It is life that gives you anguish and nights without sleep.
What is the fear of life? There are many fears but they can be reduced to a few basic fears; one is that life is slipping by and you have not yet lived. That’s the panic, basic panic – that life is going out of your hands, every moment you have less and less life, and you have not yet lived. Great fear arises. Are you going to miss? Will you be able to make it this time? Who knows, there may be no other time; life may not happen again – who knows? This seems to be the only life, and every day it is turning into a wasteland, hence the fear.
Secondly, it is life that ultimately brings death: death is the crescendo of life, the finishing touch. If you are afraid of death, that too is basically a fear of life – that life will bring death one day; that the trees will be here and the flowers will be here and the spring will come and the grass will be green and you will not be here.
While you are here you are not much here either; sooner or later grass will be growing on your grave and you will not be able to walk on it. While you can walk on it and enjoy the feel of it and the dewdrops and the coolness and the sunlit morning, you are not enjoying it because you cannot enjoy – that’s why you are afraid of life. Life is turning into death, the unknown: the known is always disappearing into the unknown; the light is always disappearing into darkness.
So life will one day take you to the door of death. But why are you not living, what hinders you from living? You have conditions, that’s what hinders. You have conditions: “If this happens, only then will I be happy” and life is not going to oblige you. You have to surrender to life. Your conditions don’t allow you the surrender; you have to drop your conditions. You have to say, “Whatever happens, I am going to enjoy. I am going to enjoy unconditionally.”
You are in love with a woman or with a man and immediately a thousand and one conditions are there: “I will love you only if this condition is fulfilled – that you will not look at anybody with loving eyes. Then I will love you.” Now, nobody can promise that, and even if one promises it, nobody can keep it. You are asking something absurd. If a beautiful man passes by, how is your woman not going to look at him. How? She may not look, she may close her eyes, she may look somewhere else – but she has looked at him. In that moment she had moved, her heart had missed a beat.
How are you going to avoid it? There are so many beautiful women in the world; you can at the most pretend. All conditions create pretensions because all conditions are unnatural.
A man who really wants to live, lives unconditionally; he doesn’t make requirements of life. He says, “Whatever comes I am going to dance. Whatever the situation, I am going to dance. I am going to live it, I am going into it with my whole being.” Then the fear of life will disappear. Lived, there is no fear; unlived life creates fear.
Let me repeat: because you are not living life, that’s why the fear comes. Life is disappearing and you are wasting a great opportunity. The opportunity may never come again or even if it comes, will you be able to do something else? You will repeat the same thing. You have been repeating – this is not the only life that you have come to, you have been through many lives. You have lived for eternity in a thousand and one forms, and you have always missed. You have missed because of your conditions.
See to it that conditions are dropped, that you love for the sheer joy of love and that you live for the sheer joy of living. Be a hedonist, be an Epicurean. To me, Epicurus was on the right track toward the Garden of Eden – his commune was called “The Garden.” He has been immensely misunderstood. I know that there is something even beyond Epicurus, but it goes through him. You will have to pass through the garden of Epicurus, only then will you reach the shrine of Buddha – otherwise not.
Hedonism is beautiful – eat, drink, and be merry – but it is not the whole story, it is just the beginning, the porch of the palace. There is far more, far beyond it, far more to life; but you have to pass through the porch. Your so-called religions have taught you to be anti-hedonistic – that’s why the fear. Your religions have taught you misery; they talk of bliss but they create misery. They go on preaching to you how to be blissful, but whatever they do and whatever methods they supply are self-destructive. They don’t allow you to be really blissful.
Be happy here, and remember, I am not saying this is all to life. Epicurus is the beginning of a buddha: you can stop at Epicurus, then you will miss much, but it is better to stop at Epicurus than not to enter Epicurus at all because then you miss all. I teach you spiritual hedonism – that is my message to you. First be hedonistic as far as the first body is concerned, then be hedonistic as far as the second body is concerned, and then be hedonistic totally in the third body.
Buddha is orgasmic. But you have to learn orgasm from the physical; you have to go from ABC. There are people who want to jump to XYZ – and they don’t know anything about ABC. They have not yet learned even how to live in the body in the world, and they want to live in heaven. They will not be able to live there, it will be impossible. Just think of yourself; if you were by accident welcomed into heaven, what would you do there? You would be as miserable as you are here – maybe more miserable because there life would be more thrilling. There would be more exploration, more love, more intensity in everything. There would be more passion – what would you do there? You have not even been able to live on this earth, which knows passion, which knows love, which knows joy, but in moderate quantities. In heaven there are no limits; heaven knows no moderation – it is excess, it is ecstasy.
Start learning how to be unconditional. People miss much for small conditions; just a small thing can destroy their whole joy and they don’t even see the proportion of it. A man has just said something to you, it hurts… And the man has always been beautiful and you have loved him, but he has just uttered a word, and it hurts, and the friendship is broken. You don’t know the joy of friendship, otherwise you would not have broken it for such a small thing, for trivia. You have been living with your wife beautifully, and for just a small thing, just a small negativity from her, bridges are broken and you start thinking of divorce.
Petty things, meaningless things, go on destroying, and because you can’t live, naturally you are afraid of life.
You say: “Why do I seem to feel more afraid of life than of death?” There is one more thing: life requires more than death will ever require, life requires a willing surrender. Death does not care for you; it simply comes, without even any notification. It simply comes and takes you away; it drags you, you are not asked, your cooperation is not asked. Death pays no respect to you, and gives not even a single moment to prepare. It happens. Life is more respectful toward you; it gives you time, it gives you freedom to choose. It gives you opportunities to cooperate or not to cooperate, hence the fear.
The fear of life is really a fear of your own self; you yourself know that you are going to miss. Knowing yourself the way you are, your fear is perfectly on the right track. It says that the way you are, you are going to miss. Life will bring a challenge and you will shrink.
Just a few days earlier, a young man came to me from the West. I was looking into his head and into his heart – his heart was ready for sannyas but his head was not ready. Now I was really confused by him – what to do? Should I give him sannyas? His heart was saying yes; a great pulsation in the heart, the heart was simply crying for it. And the head went on saying no. It is as if you are on a crossroad, and the red and the green lights both go on. It is very difficult to decide whether to pass or not – one light says one thing, the other light says just the opposite.
I tried to persuade him, I tried to seduce him toward his heart. But the more I tried, the more stubborn he became – the more stubborn the head became. The heart was joyous. When I was trying to persuade him to take the jump, the heart was taking such leaps of joy. The heart was becoming a big flame, it was almost tangible. Anybody who has eyes could have seen it – the heart was aflame. But the head was becoming darker and darker.
An opportunity, a challenge is there. In that moment I was the challenge for him, life was coming through me in that moment. Sannyas is the challenge to surrender; sannyas is the challenge to explore something new, which you have not known before. The head never knows anything new, the head is always borrowed, the head knows only things from others. It is secondhand, it is never original; it can’t be original, it collects rubbish. But it feels secure, it feels logical.
The heart is illogical. You are afraid to go with the heart; you don’t know where you will land. The head moves on the superhighway, the heart will drag you into some labyrinth in the jungle of life – you will be alone there. The head always lives with the crowd; it is Communist, it is Fascist, it is Catholic, it is Protestant, it is Hindu, it is Mohammedan. The head is part of the crowd, the heart makes you alone – you are neither a Christian nor a Hindu nor a Mohammedan. Suddenly you are alone; the whole crowd has disappeared. You start feeling afraid. Life comes only when you are alone, when you take hold of your life in your own hands, when you are no longer part of an insane crowd, when you are no longer part of this pathological world. But then you have to be alone, and in aloneness there is fear.
When a challenge like love or sannyas or samadhi or God provokes you, you feel as if death is coming close by. It is a sort of death: you will have to die to the past, to the old, only then can you be reborn to the new. Fear grips you, you say, “I will have to think.” That’s what that young man said: “I will have to think. I will have to wait.”
Thinking can never lead you into the new. Logic can never give you any new conclusions, it goes on repeating the same. Logic is a vicious circle, it moves in the same rut. Whatever conclusions come through logic were already in the premise, they are not new. Maybe now they are more articulate, that’s all, but they were given in the first premise.
Only love – and love means illogical, paradoxical – takes you to new conclusions because love knows how to take a leap. Logic is continuous with the past, it knows no leap. Love knows leaps, quantum leaps, it can jump from the old to the new, with no bridge in between. Love can give you a discontinuity with the past, but then there is fear. And love is life – if you miss love you will miss life, and then there will be the fear: “I am missing.”
You are missing because you have not been able to allow your heart, you are continuously controlling through the head; the heady people always miss. Get deeper into your being, move toward the heart. The heart is not the ultimate; you have to move even deeper than the heart, and then you come to your navel – what the Japanese call the hara. These are the three centers: the hara – two inches below the navel, the heart, and the head. The head is the farthest boundary line; when you are farthest from your being, you are in the head. When you are close to your being, you are in the heart. When you are at the very core of being, you are in the hara.
Only through the hara does fear disappear; only through the hara do you live for the first time authentically, sincerely, with no fear. That life needs to be lived, that life can be lived only if you don’t divide existence into two: body–mind, matter–soul, God–existence. If you divide, you will remain in the intellect. Drop all divisions, live as one, all the three bodies have to be lived as one, they are three aspects of your being – the physical body, the bliss body, and the buddha body. I am not against any – I am not saying choose the buddha body against the physical body. If you choose the buddha body against the physical body, your buddhahood will miss something, will lack something. It will not be perfect; it will not be the total flowering.
When you don’t reject anything, when your acceptance is complete, then you bloom. Then you bloom into a thousand-petaled lotus, sahasrar.
The second question:
Osho,
Since falling in love, even though having little to do with him, it seems entirely my own journey. Feeling nourished and much power in my being.
Love is nourishment, love is exactly like food to the soul. Food is nourishment for the body, love is nourishment for the soul. Without food you will die physically, without love you will die spiritually – in fact you will not even be born. The body needs food; the soul needs love.
Jesus is right when he says, “Man cannot live by bread alone” because bread is bread only for the body. You will have to seek and search something which nourishes your soul; so be always in love. And remember one thing: lovers don’t matter, love matters. If one lover disappears from your life, don’t become sour and bitter. If one lover has moved away from you, don’t go on clinging to the past and the memory and the nostalgia of it. That is sacrilegious, that is insulting to love. The lover is good, but the lover is good because of love. You need not sacrifice love for the lover. Lovers come and go, love remains.
When one lover has gone out of your life, don’t become poisoned by it, don’t start closing your heart. You have to live, you have to still be in love. One should always be in love – with whom is immaterial. If love goes on flowing, you will be nourished in your soul.
But there are people who make this a condition too; they become too attached to the lover. It is as if a flute player has become too attached to his flute and cannot play on another flute. And if this flute is stolen, is broken, now he will never sing. Now he will never sing – because that flute is no longer with him, how can he sing? It will be a betrayal to that flute. This is foolish but it is how humanity has been taught. If that flute is gone, search and seek for another flute, because your devotion should be toward the song, not toward the flute; the flute is just a vehicle, a passage.
So are all lovers. If one love is no longer there, start searching, exploring for another. Remain always in love, and your soul will grow, will be nourished.
People become obsessed. Obsession is pathological; because of obsession the world suffers so much. A few people suffer because they cannot love, and a few people suffer because they have loved, but all suffer all the same. Nothing is, or can be, eternal here; all is momentary. Our meeting is momentary, all meetings are momentary. It is a miracle that they happen – that you fall in love with a man or a woman or with a friend. It is a miracle that it has happened. Be grateful to God, but don’t take it for granted. Nothing can be taken for granted; it will disappear one day, as it has appeared.
It is like a roseflower. In the morning it was there, by the evening it is gone – and the roseflower is far more beautiful because it will disappear. If it was going to be there forever and ever like a plastic flower, there would not have been any beauty; the very possibility of its disappearance makes it immensely valuable. So if you are in love with a person remember the roseflower. Love is a roseflower – it is there but it is not like a “thing,” it is very fragile. It is more like a fragrance – it has come to you on the wings of the wind, the wind may take it away again. It is a gift out of the blue. You cannot cling to it, you cannot possess it. If you try to possess it, you will kill it immediately.
So a few people start possessing and kill, and a few people don’t possess, but when the lover has gone or moved away, has taken a separate path, then they are full of tears forever. Just crying over spilt milk – don’t cry over spilt milk. Go ahead, search and seek again, God will come in some other form. Somewhere else another bush may have bloomed and, who knows, a bigger roseflower may be waiting for you.
Remain always in love, never betray love. Lovers come and go. Trust love that it will happen again, that you will again be dancing and singing. Trust life, trust love – it is nourishment, it is alchemy. It is through love that one is born, it is through love that one becomes fresh again and again, rejuvenated: again and again feeling enthusiasm for life, again and again feeling the celebration of life, again and again feeling grateful to existence.
People whose loves have disappeared, whose hearts have become without love, are like a wasteland, are like deserts. They can pray but their prayer will have no beat to it; they can pray but their prayer will lose all meaning; they can pray but their prayer will have no juice to it – it will be dry, it will be dust, it cannot relate to existence.
The day you stop relating with people, you stop relating with existence. People are the closest existence to you; relate to people, relate to trees, relate to birds and animals and rocks, and only then will you be able to relate to God. Love is the way.
The third question:
Osho,
I believe that nothing is impossible. What do you say?
Then try to strike a match on a cake of soap.
The fourth question:
Osho,
The Fourth Way, as taught by Gurdjieff, has been called the way of conscience. What place has conscience in your teaching?
The question is from Cecil Lewis.
No place at all – I don’t believe in conscience, I believe only in consciousness. I don’t believe in morality, I believe only in religion. I am amoral.
Conscience is a trick that society has played upon you; society creates conscience so that you may never need consciousness. You have been deceived. For example when Jesus says “Love is God,” it is not out of his conscience, it is out of his consciousness. He knows it. It is not a belief, it is his experience. When a Christian says “Love is God,” it is his conscience not his consciousness. He has not known it, he has not lived it, he has only heard it repeated again and again – he has become hypnotized by it.
Each child is being hypnotized by the parents, the priests, the politicians, the society. Constant repetition of a certain thing becomes conscience. You go on teaching the child, “This is right. This is right. This is right.” Hearing it again and again, his mind is being conditioned. After many years he will also say, “This is right.” It will be automatic; it will not be from his own being, it will come from the gramophone record that the society has placed in his being. It is like Delgado’s electrode. It is a dangerous trick that society has played on everybody down the centuries.
That’s why there are so many consciences in the world – the Hindu has one type of conscience, the Mohammedan has another type of conscience. How can consciences be so many? Truth is one, and consciences are so many?
From my childhood I was taught a very, very strict vegetarianism. I was born in a Jaina family absolutely dogmatic about vegetarianism; not even tomatoes were allowed in my house because they look a little like red meat. Poor innocent tomatoes were not allowed. Nobody had ever heard of anybody eating in the night; the sunset was the limit. I had not eaten in the night in eighteen years; it was a great sin.
Then for the first time I went on a picnic with a few friends to the mountains. They were all Hindus and I was the only Jaina; they were not worried about cooking in the night. The mountains were so beautiful and there was so much to explore – so they didn’t bother about cooking at all, they cooked in the night. Now it was a great problem for me – to eat or not to eat? I was feeling really hungry; the whole day had been arduous, moving in the mountains, and I was feeling really hungry – so hungry for the first time in my life.
And then they started cooking – and the food smell, the aroma… I was just sitting there, a Jaina. It was so difficult for me – what to do? The whole conditioning of eighteen years made the idea of eating in the night impossible, but to sleep with that kind of hunger was impossible. They all started persuading me, saying, “There is nobody here to know that you have eaten. We will not tell your family at all. Don’t be worried.” I was ready to be seduced, so they seduced me and I ate, but then I could not sleep – I had to vomit two or three times in the night, the whole night became nightmarish. It would have been better if I had not eaten.
Eighteen years of conditioning that to eat in the night is sin… Nobody else was vomiting, they were all fast asleep and snoring, they had all sinned and were sleeping perfectly well. They had been committing the sin for eighteen years, and I had committed it for the first time and I was being punished – this seems unjust!
Conscience is created, it is a conditioning; all that you think is good or bad is nothing but conditioning. But this conditioning can go on managing your whole life. The society has entered you and controls you from there, from within, it has become your inner voice. Because it has become your inner voice, you cannot hear your real inner voice. So my suggestion is, unburden yourself of conscience: throw out all the conditioning, cathart it, be free from it. That’s what I mean when I say don’t be a Christian, a Hindu, a Jaina, a Buddhist.
Just be, and be alert; in that alertness you will always know what is right and what is wrong. Right and wrong are not fixed – something may be right in the morning and may be wrong in the evening, and something may be wrong in the evening and may be right in the night. Circumstances change. An alert man, a conscious man, has no fixed ideas, he has spontaneous responses but no fixed ideas. You never act spontaneously because of fixed ideas; your action is always a kind of reaction – not really action.
When you act out of spontaneity, with no idea, with no prejudice, then there is real action. And action has passion in it, intensity in it. It is original and it is first-hand. Action makes your life creative and action makes your life continuously a celebration, because each act becomes an expression of your being. Conscience is a false being.
I think the French language is the only language that has only one word for consciousness and conscience – a single word meaning both. That is beautiful; real conscience should be only consciousness, nothing else. You should become more conscious.
But I also have differences with George Gurdjieff about consciousness. When he says, “Be conscious” he says, “Be conscious that you are,” he insists for self-remembering. Now, this has to be understood. Your consciousness has two polarities; one polarity is the content. For example, a cloud of anger is inside you – that is the content. And you are aware of the cloud of anger – that is consciousness, the witness, watchfulness, the observer. So your consciousness can be divided in two – the observer and the observed.
Gurdjieff says: “Go on remembering the observer – self-remembering.” Buddha says: “Forget the observer, just watch the observed.” If you have to choose between Buddha and Gurdjieff, I suggest choosing Buddha. There is a danger with Gurdjieff that you may become too self-conscious – rather than becoming self-aware, you may become self-conscious, you may become an egoist. I have felt that in many Gurdjieff disciples. They have become very, very great egoists. Not that Gurdjieff was an egoist – he was one of the rarest enlightened men of this age, but the method has a danger in it. It is very difficult to make a distinction between self-consciousness and self-remembering. It is so subtle it is almost impossible to make the distinction; for the ignorant masses it is almost always self-consciousness that will take possession of them; it will not be self-remembering.
The very word self is dangerous – you become more and more settled in the idea of the self. And the idea of the self isolates you from existence.
Buddha says forget the self because there is no self; the self is just in the grammar, in the language – it is not anything existential. Just observe the content. By observing the content, the content starts disappearing. Once the content disappears… Watch your anger – and watching it, you will see it is disappearing. Once the anger has disappeared there is silence. There is no self, no observer, and nothing to be observed; there is silence. This silence is brought by vipassana, Buddha’s method of awareness.
Ordinary man does both: he goes on changing gear – sometimes he observes the self, sometimes he observes the content. He goes on moving from this to that, he is a constant wavering. Gurdjieff says that you must be settled in the observer, Buddha says look at the observed.
My own approach is different from both. My approach is that Gurdjieff’s method is more dangerous than Buddha’s method, but even in Buddha’s method there is bound to be some tension – the effort to watch. The very effort to watch will make you tense.
A Buddhist monk was brought to me from Sri Lanka. He was unable to sleep – for three years he had not slept. All kinds of medications had been tried upon him but nothing was helping, no tranquilizer was of any help. Nobody had bothered that he went on doing vipassana, Buddha’s method of insight – nobody had thought about it. When he came to me, the first thing I asked him was, “Are you doing vipassana?” Because he was a Buddhist monk, he must be doing it. He said, “Yes, for three years.” I said, “That is the cause of your sleeplessness.”
If you are continuously making an effort to watch, then in the night you will not be able to relax and fall into sleep – the watching will become continuous. And if you are even watching in the night, how can you fall asleep? You cannot relax, the tension has become fixed. It is a known fact that Buddhist monks sleep only three or four hours at the most. It is not a gain. They think, and others also think, that this is a gain – that they have attained something, they sleep only three or four hours. It is not. They are losing something very valuable – relaxation. And they will look tense; on their faces they will look tense. They will look very quiet, but tense. They will look very silent, but their silence is not the silence of relaxation, but of effort. You can see the effort in the corner, defining them.
My own method is: you relax. Neither watch the watcher nor watch the watched. Just relax, be passive; if something floats by and you cannot help seeing it, see it, but don’t make any effort to see it deliberately. If you are relaxed like a mirror, if some cloud passes by it will be reflected. Be like a mirror – lucid, passive. Drop both the Gurdjieffian method of self-remembering and the Buddhist method of watching.
If you have to choose between Gurdjieff and Buddha, choose Buddha. If you have to choose between Buddha and me, choose me.
Relax, just see things; and there is nothing much to see – if you miss something, it is not of any worth. You can miss, you are allowed to miss; take life easy, take it easy.
So people who have been in some kind of effort – and Gurdjieff’s work is of great effort – will be puzzled here. That’s why Lewis is puzzled, a bit confused, and sooner or later, he has to either understand me or to condemn me – both are open. Condemnation will be easier because for thirty years working hard… And now suddenly he has become attracted to a man who does not believe in effort at all, who does not believe in improvement, who does not believe in growth, who does not believe in going anywhere, who does not believe in any way.
He says, “The Fourth Way, as taught by Gurdjieff…” What I am teaching here is: no way. There is really no way, because truth is not a goal. All ways lead away from where we are. All roads, all ways, all paths, distract you from truth. There is nowhere to go, and nobody to go either. There is no way of being here and now but to be here and now. When I say “Be here and now,” don’t ask how. The “how” will take you away. When I say “Be here and now,” don’t ask “What is the way to be here and now?” There is no way of being here and now but to be here and now. There is no way to be still, and no need of any way. To see, wholly to see, that there is no way, is at once to be still. Seeing that, is stillness. All ways lead everywhere but here.
To live one’s life as it comes and goes is awareness: passive, lucid, mirror-like, with no tension. I don’t teach you attention because attention has the word tension in it, and the phenomenon of attention has the feeling of tension in it – hence the word attention. Enjoy, relax. Just understanding that there is nowhere to go is liberation. Liberation is not like a goal waiting for you somewhere else: liberation is understanding that you are already liberated.
It is impious for us to assert so flatly what should be, in the face of what is. What is, is the truth. Yatha bhutam: that which is, is the truth. To assert what should be is impious, sacrilegious, it is a sin; “should” is a sin. That which is – relax with it, float with it. I don’t even teach swimming, I simply say float with it. It is our responsibility to know how to accept and live through that which is.
So I don’t teach any way – fourth or fifth or sixth, and I don’t teach conscience; I teach a lucid relaxed consciousness. Out of that, many flowerings happen; out of that, many songs are born, but they are born on their own. You cannot be the doer of them and you cannot feel enhanced, that “I have done.” You cannot feel your ego fulfilled through them. The more those flowers will come, the more you will disappear. One day there is flowering, but you are not; that is the day, the moment of liberation.
The fifth question:
Osho,
I want to commit suicide.
Then first take sannyas, and you may not need to commit suicide because sannyas is the greatest suicide possible.
Why should one want to commit suicide? Death is coming on its own. Why are you in such a hurry? Death will come, it always comes. Even if you don’t want it to come, it comes; you need not go to meet it, it comes uninvited.
You must be missing your life badly. It is out of anger, out of desperation, that you want to commit suicide. I will teach you the real suicide: become a sannyasin. The ordinary suicide will not help much, you will be born immediately into some other womb somewhere. Some foolish couple will be making love somewhere, remember, and you will be trapped again. You cannot escape so easily – there are fools and fools. Before you escape from this body you will be caught in another net, again you will have to go to school and college and university – just think of that! Think of all those miserable experiences and that will prevent you from committing suicide.
Indians don’t commit suicide so easily because they know that they will be born again. In the West, much suicide, and the suicidal idea exists; many people commit suicide, and psychoanalysts say there are very, very rare people who don’t think of committing it. In fact one person has investigated and gathered data, and he says that every person, every single person thinks at least four times in his life of committing suicide. He must be thinking of the West; in the East nobody wants to commit suicide because of the idea of reincarnation. What is the point? You escape from this door and from another door you are in again; you can’t go so easily.
I will teach you real suicide: you can go forever. That’s what it means to become a buddha – to go forever. When somebody used to commit this suicide in samadhi, Buddha had a special name for him; he would call him anagamin – one who will not return, one who has gone to the farthest shore and will not be coming back. I can make you anagamin, a nonreturner; then no womb can be a trap for you again.
Why do you want to commit suicide? Maybe life is not going the way you want it to go? But who are you to impose your way on life, your will on life? Maybe your desires are not fulfilled? Then drop desires, why drop yourself? Maybe your expectations are not fulfilled, and you are feeling frustrated? In frustration one wants to destroy, and there are only two possibilities – either murder somebody or murder yourself. Murdering somebody else is more dangerous so people start thinking of murdering themselves; but it is murder.
Why not change your life rather than destroying it? And please don’t commit it here, otherwise you will create problems for me.
I have heard…
A policeman saw a man standing on the parapet of Blackfriars Bridge one evening, obviously about to jump. Rushing over to him, he tried to talk him out of it.
“If you jump, sir,” he said, “it will be my duty to jump in after you to try to rescue you. Then I’ll get wet, catch pneumonia, and die too. So why don’t you just go home quietly and put your head in the gas oven?”
Please don’t create any trouble here. And don’t talk about it because there are many people who would like the idea – you may convert a few people.
I have heard…
A man was walking across Waterloo Bridge late one night when he noticed another man on the parapet about to throw himself over. He rushed up to the would-be suicide and shouted, “Wait a minute! Don’t jump! Come and have a drink and talk things over.”
The two men went off to a nearby pub and spent the next hour chatting over the state of the country, inflation, taxes, and the future of Western civilization. Then they finished their drinks, walked back to Waterloo Bridge, and both jumped.
So don’t spread this idea here. If you want to commit suicide just come in the evening to darshan and I will help you.
The sixth question:
Osho,
I love ordinary life. It is like daytime in which I feel more and more awake. But I often have the sense that there is a universe of mysteries that belongs in darkness and is unavailable to me. Esoteric teachings, symbols, “higher knowledge,” seem to point to these mysteries, but I can never get interested in the books. I would rather journey into the night. Can you talk about this please?
There is no other life than this ordinary life. Because people are incapable of living this ordinary life, they invent esoteric things. These are the people who are incapable of living – they distract their minds and beings. All esoteric teachings and all hidden teachings and all those so-called mysteries are just mumbo jumbo.
The mystery is here. The mystery is in the trees and in the rocks and in the birds. The mystery is in people – in you, in me. The mystery is in relating, the mystery is in singing, the mystery is in dancing, the mystery is in love, the mystery is in prayer. Avoid all that nonsense literature which goes in the name of esotericism; it is pathological. These are the people who are incapable of tasting this life, they have to find some excuses, alibis, to avoid this life. They cannot enjoy, they cannot be passionately in it. They don’t have passion, they don’t have intensity of life, they don’t know how to live. They have forgotten all – how to be natural and spontaneous. Now they have to find some way to pretend that this life is not worth living, the grapes are sour – there are other grapes, hidden grapes, which only they and their inner circle knows.
Theosophy and anthroposophy and Masonic lodges – all kinds of nonsense goes on. Avoid it, it is against life. This is the only life there is, the only dance there is. The really enlightened people have known the extraordinariness of this life.
A man asked a Zen master: “Since you have become enlightened what changes happened in your life?”
The master said: “Before I became enlightened I used to chop wood and carry water from the well.”
And the man asked: “Now that you have become enlightened what do you do? What changes have happened?”
He said: “I chop wood and I carry water from the well.”
But the man was puzzled. “Then,” he said, “what is the difference? It is the same thing.”
The master laughed. He said, “It is not the same thing. Before, I used to chop wood and think a thousand and one thoughts. Now I simply chop wood. It is so beautiful just to chop wood and do nothing. Before, I used to have a thousand and one desires while drawing water from the well. Now I simply draw water, and to tell you the truth, there is no one inside me who is drawing the water. When I am chopping the wood it is wonderful because there is nobody in me chopping the wood; I have disappeared! The wood is being chopped and the water is being carried, and it is tremendously beautiful.”
The ordinary life becomes extraordinary if you live it totally, fully. Avoid esotericism. They are dangerous things; you can become hooked on them and then you will be just in mind-trips, imagination. If you love imagination it is okay, if you love fantasizing it is okay. You can create your own planes and your own astral travels and subtle bodies and whatever you want.
A young woman dreamed that Prince Charming had come on his horse. A beautiful horse and beautiful prince… She had been waiting for this Prince Charming forever and ever, and he had come. When you wait too much, beware – it happens.
The prince took the woman on the horse and the horse started galloping toward some unknown destination, and the woman was thrilled – who would not be thrilled? She asked the prince, “Where are you taking me?” and the prince said, “This is your dream. So you say to me where you want to be taken. This is your dream.”
In these so-called esoteric trips, wherever you are going it is your dream. Masters will appear – Koot Humi and K.H. – and automatic handwriting will appear, and messages will be received from the beyond. All sheer nonsense: eat your breakfast and have a good sleep.
The seventh question:
Osho,
Why do people like Buddha or Christ appear only at certain times?
Because they are afraid of you: they think a lot before they gather enough courage to come back to this earth to be again crucified by you, to be again stoned by you.
And sometimes, even if they come, they live here anonymously so that you cannot stone and you cannot crucify them. Then everything happens in its own time. When the spring comes, trees will bloom; and when the right time comes, the fruits will ripen. Every moment things are happening, but nothing ever happens for which the moment has not come. Everything has its own time, and it is good.
On the planet Volcanus, the gases from the many volcanoes which supplied the nuclear lighting were running out. It was a race against time to find another way of lighting the planet.
Suddenly they were plunged into total darkness.
The people of Volcanus were terrified. Just then they heard a slippery slurpery noise, and rays of light appeared at the top of all volcanoes. The lights got brighter and brighter, lighting the whole of the planet.
“We are saved,” shouted the people. “The glow worms from inside the volcanoes are giving us the light we need.”
The glow worms got closer.
“But why haven’t you shone before?” asked the people.
“We weren’t needed,” said the leader of the glow worms. “But when the planet was plunged into total darkness, we decided that the time was right. Because when you gotta glow, you gotta glow.”
Enough for today.
Osho,
Why do I seem to feel more afraid of life than of death?
Death is unknown. You cannot really be afraid of that with which you are not at all acquainted. Fear is a relationship – you have to know something to be afraid of it. Nobody is really afraid of death; whenever somebody says, “I am afraid of death” he is simply saying that he is afraid to lose life. Death is absolutely unknown. So everybody is afraid of life – it is life that is the problem, not death. It is life that gives you anguish and nights without sleep.
What is the fear of life? There are many fears but they can be reduced to a few basic fears; one is that life is slipping by and you have not yet lived. That’s the panic, basic panic – that life is going out of your hands, every moment you have less and less life, and you have not yet lived. Great fear arises. Are you going to miss? Will you be able to make it this time? Who knows, there may be no other time; life may not happen again – who knows? This seems to be the only life, and every day it is turning into a wasteland, hence the fear.
Secondly, it is life that ultimately brings death: death is the crescendo of life, the finishing touch. If you are afraid of death, that too is basically a fear of life – that life will bring death one day; that the trees will be here and the flowers will be here and the spring will come and the grass will be green and you will not be here.
While you are here you are not much here either; sooner or later grass will be growing on your grave and you will not be able to walk on it. While you can walk on it and enjoy the feel of it and the dewdrops and the coolness and the sunlit morning, you are not enjoying it because you cannot enjoy – that’s why you are afraid of life. Life is turning into death, the unknown: the known is always disappearing into the unknown; the light is always disappearing into darkness.
So life will one day take you to the door of death. But why are you not living, what hinders you from living? You have conditions, that’s what hinders. You have conditions: “If this happens, only then will I be happy” and life is not going to oblige you. You have to surrender to life. Your conditions don’t allow you the surrender; you have to drop your conditions. You have to say, “Whatever happens, I am going to enjoy. I am going to enjoy unconditionally.”
You are in love with a woman or with a man and immediately a thousand and one conditions are there: “I will love you only if this condition is fulfilled – that you will not look at anybody with loving eyes. Then I will love you.” Now, nobody can promise that, and even if one promises it, nobody can keep it. You are asking something absurd. If a beautiful man passes by, how is your woman not going to look at him. How? She may not look, she may close her eyes, she may look somewhere else – but she has looked at him. In that moment she had moved, her heart had missed a beat.
How are you going to avoid it? There are so many beautiful women in the world; you can at the most pretend. All conditions create pretensions because all conditions are unnatural.
A man who really wants to live, lives unconditionally; he doesn’t make requirements of life. He says, “Whatever comes I am going to dance. Whatever the situation, I am going to dance. I am going to live it, I am going into it with my whole being.” Then the fear of life will disappear. Lived, there is no fear; unlived life creates fear.
Let me repeat: because you are not living life, that’s why the fear comes. Life is disappearing and you are wasting a great opportunity. The opportunity may never come again or even if it comes, will you be able to do something else? You will repeat the same thing. You have been repeating – this is not the only life that you have come to, you have been through many lives. You have lived for eternity in a thousand and one forms, and you have always missed. You have missed because of your conditions.
See to it that conditions are dropped, that you love for the sheer joy of love and that you live for the sheer joy of living. Be a hedonist, be an Epicurean. To me, Epicurus was on the right track toward the Garden of Eden – his commune was called “The Garden.” He has been immensely misunderstood. I know that there is something even beyond Epicurus, but it goes through him. You will have to pass through the garden of Epicurus, only then will you reach the shrine of Buddha – otherwise not.
Hedonism is beautiful – eat, drink, and be merry – but it is not the whole story, it is just the beginning, the porch of the palace. There is far more, far beyond it, far more to life; but you have to pass through the porch. Your so-called religions have taught you to be anti-hedonistic – that’s why the fear. Your religions have taught you misery; they talk of bliss but they create misery. They go on preaching to you how to be blissful, but whatever they do and whatever methods they supply are self-destructive. They don’t allow you to be really blissful.
Be happy here, and remember, I am not saying this is all to life. Epicurus is the beginning of a buddha: you can stop at Epicurus, then you will miss much, but it is better to stop at Epicurus than not to enter Epicurus at all because then you miss all. I teach you spiritual hedonism – that is my message to you. First be hedonistic as far as the first body is concerned, then be hedonistic as far as the second body is concerned, and then be hedonistic totally in the third body.
Buddha is orgasmic. But you have to learn orgasm from the physical; you have to go from ABC. There are people who want to jump to XYZ – and they don’t know anything about ABC. They have not yet learned even how to live in the body in the world, and they want to live in heaven. They will not be able to live there, it will be impossible. Just think of yourself; if you were by accident welcomed into heaven, what would you do there? You would be as miserable as you are here – maybe more miserable because there life would be more thrilling. There would be more exploration, more love, more intensity in everything. There would be more passion – what would you do there? You have not even been able to live on this earth, which knows passion, which knows love, which knows joy, but in moderate quantities. In heaven there are no limits; heaven knows no moderation – it is excess, it is ecstasy.
Start learning how to be unconditional. People miss much for small conditions; just a small thing can destroy their whole joy and they don’t even see the proportion of it. A man has just said something to you, it hurts… And the man has always been beautiful and you have loved him, but he has just uttered a word, and it hurts, and the friendship is broken. You don’t know the joy of friendship, otherwise you would not have broken it for such a small thing, for trivia. You have been living with your wife beautifully, and for just a small thing, just a small negativity from her, bridges are broken and you start thinking of divorce.
Petty things, meaningless things, go on destroying, and because you can’t live, naturally you are afraid of life.
You say: “Why do I seem to feel more afraid of life than of death?” There is one more thing: life requires more than death will ever require, life requires a willing surrender. Death does not care for you; it simply comes, without even any notification. It simply comes and takes you away; it drags you, you are not asked, your cooperation is not asked. Death pays no respect to you, and gives not even a single moment to prepare. It happens. Life is more respectful toward you; it gives you time, it gives you freedom to choose. It gives you opportunities to cooperate or not to cooperate, hence the fear.
The fear of life is really a fear of your own self; you yourself know that you are going to miss. Knowing yourself the way you are, your fear is perfectly on the right track. It says that the way you are, you are going to miss. Life will bring a challenge and you will shrink.
Just a few days earlier, a young man came to me from the West. I was looking into his head and into his heart – his heart was ready for sannyas but his head was not ready. Now I was really confused by him – what to do? Should I give him sannyas? His heart was saying yes; a great pulsation in the heart, the heart was simply crying for it. And the head went on saying no. It is as if you are on a crossroad, and the red and the green lights both go on. It is very difficult to decide whether to pass or not – one light says one thing, the other light says just the opposite.
I tried to persuade him, I tried to seduce him toward his heart. But the more I tried, the more stubborn he became – the more stubborn the head became. The heart was joyous. When I was trying to persuade him to take the jump, the heart was taking such leaps of joy. The heart was becoming a big flame, it was almost tangible. Anybody who has eyes could have seen it – the heart was aflame. But the head was becoming darker and darker.
An opportunity, a challenge is there. In that moment I was the challenge for him, life was coming through me in that moment. Sannyas is the challenge to surrender; sannyas is the challenge to explore something new, which you have not known before. The head never knows anything new, the head is always borrowed, the head knows only things from others. It is secondhand, it is never original; it can’t be original, it collects rubbish. But it feels secure, it feels logical.
The heart is illogical. You are afraid to go with the heart; you don’t know where you will land. The head moves on the superhighway, the heart will drag you into some labyrinth in the jungle of life – you will be alone there. The head always lives with the crowd; it is Communist, it is Fascist, it is Catholic, it is Protestant, it is Hindu, it is Mohammedan. The head is part of the crowd, the heart makes you alone – you are neither a Christian nor a Hindu nor a Mohammedan. Suddenly you are alone; the whole crowd has disappeared. You start feeling afraid. Life comes only when you are alone, when you take hold of your life in your own hands, when you are no longer part of an insane crowd, when you are no longer part of this pathological world. But then you have to be alone, and in aloneness there is fear.
When a challenge like love or sannyas or samadhi or God provokes you, you feel as if death is coming close by. It is a sort of death: you will have to die to the past, to the old, only then can you be reborn to the new. Fear grips you, you say, “I will have to think.” That’s what that young man said: “I will have to think. I will have to wait.”
Thinking can never lead you into the new. Logic can never give you any new conclusions, it goes on repeating the same. Logic is a vicious circle, it moves in the same rut. Whatever conclusions come through logic were already in the premise, they are not new. Maybe now they are more articulate, that’s all, but they were given in the first premise.
Only love – and love means illogical, paradoxical – takes you to new conclusions because love knows how to take a leap. Logic is continuous with the past, it knows no leap. Love knows leaps, quantum leaps, it can jump from the old to the new, with no bridge in between. Love can give you a discontinuity with the past, but then there is fear. And love is life – if you miss love you will miss life, and then there will be the fear: “I am missing.”
You are missing because you have not been able to allow your heart, you are continuously controlling through the head; the heady people always miss. Get deeper into your being, move toward the heart. The heart is not the ultimate; you have to move even deeper than the heart, and then you come to your navel – what the Japanese call the hara. These are the three centers: the hara – two inches below the navel, the heart, and the head. The head is the farthest boundary line; when you are farthest from your being, you are in the head. When you are close to your being, you are in the heart. When you are at the very core of being, you are in the hara.
Only through the hara does fear disappear; only through the hara do you live for the first time authentically, sincerely, with no fear. That life needs to be lived, that life can be lived only if you don’t divide existence into two: body–mind, matter–soul, God–existence. If you divide, you will remain in the intellect. Drop all divisions, live as one, all the three bodies have to be lived as one, they are three aspects of your being – the physical body, the bliss body, and the buddha body. I am not against any – I am not saying choose the buddha body against the physical body. If you choose the buddha body against the physical body, your buddhahood will miss something, will lack something. It will not be perfect; it will not be the total flowering.
When you don’t reject anything, when your acceptance is complete, then you bloom. Then you bloom into a thousand-petaled lotus, sahasrar.
The second question:
Osho,
Since falling in love, even though having little to do with him, it seems entirely my own journey. Feeling nourished and much power in my being.
Love is nourishment, love is exactly like food to the soul. Food is nourishment for the body, love is nourishment for the soul. Without food you will die physically, without love you will die spiritually – in fact you will not even be born. The body needs food; the soul needs love.
Jesus is right when he says, “Man cannot live by bread alone” because bread is bread only for the body. You will have to seek and search something which nourishes your soul; so be always in love. And remember one thing: lovers don’t matter, love matters. If one lover disappears from your life, don’t become sour and bitter. If one lover has moved away from you, don’t go on clinging to the past and the memory and the nostalgia of it. That is sacrilegious, that is insulting to love. The lover is good, but the lover is good because of love. You need not sacrifice love for the lover. Lovers come and go, love remains.
When one lover has gone out of your life, don’t become poisoned by it, don’t start closing your heart. You have to live, you have to still be in love. One should always be in love – with whom is immaterial. If love goes on flowing, you will be nourished in your soul.
But there are people who make this a condition too; they become too attached to the lover. It is as if a flute player has become too attached to his flute and cannot play on another flute. And if this flute is stolen, is broken, now he will never sing. Now he will never sing – because that flute is no longer with him, how can he sing? It will be a betrayal to that flute. This is foolish but it is how humanity has been taught. If that flute is gone, search and seek for another flute, because your devotion should be toward the song, not toward the flute; the flute is just a vehicle, a passage.
So are all lovers. If one love is no longer there, start searching, exploring for another. Remain always in love, and your soul will grow, will be nourished.
People become obsessed. Obsession is pathological; because of obsession the world suffers so much. A few people suffer because they cannot love, and a few people suffer because they have loved, but all suffer all the same. Nothing is, or can be, eternal here; all is momentary. Our meeting is momentary, all meetings are momentary. It is a miracle that they happen – that you fall in love with a man or a woman or with a friend. It is a miracle that it has happened. Be grateful to God, but don’t take it for granted. Nothing can be taken for granted; it will disappear one day, as it has appeared.
It is like a roseflower. In the morning it was there, by the evening it is gone – and the roseflower is far more beautiful because it will disappear. If it was going to be there forever and ever like a plastic flower, there would not have been any beauty; the very possibility of its disappearance makes it immensely valuable. So if you are in love with a person remember the roseflower. Love is a roseflower – it is there but it is not like a “thing,” it is very fragile. It is more like a fragrance – it has come to you on the wings of the wind, the wind may take it away again. It is a gift out of the blue. You cannot cling to it, you cannot possess it. If you try to possess it, you will kill it immediately.
So a few people start possessing and kill, and a few people don’t possess, but when the lover has gone or moved away, has taken a separate path, then they are full of tears forever. Just crying over spilt milk – don’t cry over spilt milk. Go ahead, search and seek again, God will come in some other form. Somewhere else another bush may have bloomed and, who knows, a bigger roseflower may be waiting for you.
Remain always in love, never betray love. Lovers come and go. Trust love that it will happen again, that you will again be dancing and singing. Trust life, trust love – it is nourishment, it is alchemy. It is through love that one is born, it is through love that one becomes fresh again and again, rejuvenated: again and again feeling enthusiasm for life, again and again feeling the celebration of life, again and again feeling grateful to existence.
People whose loves have disappeared, whose hearts have become without love, are like a wasteland, are like deserts. They can pray but their prayer will have no beat to it; they can pray but their prayer will lose all meaning; they can pray but their prayer will have no juice to it – it will be dry, it will be dust, it cannot relate to existence.
The day you stop relating with people, you stop relating with existence. People are the closest existence to you; relate to people, relate to trees, relate to birds and animals and rocks, and only then will you be able to relate to God. Love is the way.
The third question:
Osho,
I believe that nothing is impossible. What do you say?
Then try to strike a match on a cake of soap.
The fourth question:
Osho,
The Fourth Way, as taught by Gurdjieff, has been called the way of conscience. What place has conscience in your teaching?
The question is from Cecil Lewis.
No place at all – I don’t believe in conscience, I believe only in consciousness. I don’t believe in morality, I believe only in religion. I am amoral.
Conscience is a trick that society has played upon you; society creates conscience so that you may never need consciousness. You have been deceived. For example when Jesus says “Love is God,” it is not out of his conscience, it is out of his consciousness. He knows it. It is not a belief, it is his experience. When a Christian says “Love is God,” it is his conscience not his consciousness. He has not known it, he has not lived it, he has only heard it repeated again and again – he has become hypnotized by it.
Each child is being hypnotized by the parents, the priests, the politicians, the society. Constant repetition of a certain thing becomes conscience. You go on teaching the child, “This is right. This is right. This is right.” Hearing it again and again, his mind is being conditioned. After many years he will also say, “This is right.” It will be automatic; it will not be from his own being, it will come from the gramophone record that the society has placed in his being. It is like Delgado’s electrode. It is a dangerous trick that society has played on everybody down the centuries.
That’s why there are so many consciences in the world – the Hindu has one type of conscience, the Mohammedan has another type of conscience. How can consciences be so many? Truth is one, and consciences are so many?
From my childhood I was taught a very, very strict vegetarianism. I was born in a Jaina family absolutely dogmatic about vegetarianism; not even tomatoes were allowed in my house because they look a little like red meat. Poor innocent tomatoes were not allowed. Nobody had ever heard of anybody eating in the night; the sunset was the limit. I had not eaten in the night in eighteen years; it was a great sin.
Then for the first time I went on a picnic with a few friends to the mountains. They were all Hindus and I was the only Jaina; they were not worried about cooking in the night. The mountains were so beautiful and there was so much to explore – so they didn’t bother about cooking at all, they cooked in the night. Now it was a great problem for me – to eat or not to eat? I was feeling really hungry; the whole day had been arduous, moving in the mountains, and I was feeling really hungry – so hungry for the first time in my life.
And then they started cooking – and the food smell, the aroma… I was just sitting there, a Jaina. It was so difficult for me – what to do? The whole conditioning of eighteen years made the idea of eating in the night impossible, but to sleep with that kind of hunger was impossible. They all started persuading me, saying, “There is nobody here to know that you have eaten. We will not tell your family at all. Don’t be worried.” I was ready to be seduced, so they seduced me and I ate, but then I could not sleep – I had to vomit two or three times in the night, the whole night became nightmarish. It would have been better if I had not eaten.
Eighteen years of conditioning that to eat in the night is sin… Nobody else was vomiting, they were all fast asleep and snoring, they had all sinned and were sleeping perfectly well. They had been committing the sin for eighteen years, and I had committed it for the first time and I was being punished – this seems unjust!
Conscience is created, it is a conditioning; all that you think is good or bad is nothing but conditioning. But this conditioning can go on managing your whole life. The society has entered you and controls you from there, from within, it has become your inner voice. Because it has become your inner voice, you cannot hear your real inner voice. So my suggestion is, unburden yourself of conscience: throw out all the conditioning, cathart it, be free from it. That’s what I mean when I say don’t be a Christian, a Hindu, a Jaina, a Buddhist.
Just be, and be alert; in that alertness you will always know what is right and what is wrong. Right and wrong are not fixed – something may be right in the morning and may be wrong in the evening, and something may be wrong in the evening and may be right in the night. Circumstances change. An alert man, a conscious man, has no fixed ideas, he has spontaneous responses but no fixed ideas. You never act spontaneously because of fixed ideas; your action is always a kind of reaction – not really action.
When you act out of spontaneity, with no idea, with no prejudice, then there is real action. And action has passion in it, intensity in it. It is original and it is first-hand. Action makes your life creative and action makes your life continuously a celebration, because each act becomes an expression of your being. Conscience is a false being.
I think the French language is the only language that has only one word for consciousness and conscience – a single word meaning both. That is beautiful; real conscience should be only consciousness, nothing else. You should become more conscious.
But I also have differences with George Gurdjieff about consciousness. When he says, “Be conscious” he says, “Be conscious that you are,” he insists for self-remembering. Now, this has to be understood. Your consciousness has two polarities; one polarity is the content. For example, a cloud of anger is inside you – that is the content. And you are aware of the cloud of anger – that is consciousness, the witness, watchfulness, the observer. So your consciousness can be divided in two – the observer and the observed.
Gurdjieff says: “Go on remembering the observer – self-remembering.” Buddha says: “Forget the observer, just watch the observed.” If you have to choose between Buddha and Gurdjieff, I suggest choosing Buddha. There is a danger with Gurdjieff that you may become too self-conscious – rather than becoming self-aware, you may become self-conscious, you may become an egoist. I have felt that in many Gurdjieff disciples. They have become very, very great egoists. Not that Gurdjieff was an egoist – he was one of the rarest enlightened men of this age, but the method has a danger in it. It is very difficult to make a distinction between self-consciousness and self-remembering. It is so subtle it is almost impossible to make the distinction; for the ignorant masses it is almost always self-consciousness that will take possession of them; it will not be self-remembering.
The very word self is dangerous – you become more and more settled in the idea of the self. And the idea of the self isolates you from existence.
Buddha says forget the self because there is no self; the self is just in the grammar, in the language – it is not anything existential. Just observe the content. By observing the content, the content starts disappearing. Once the content disappears… Watch your anger – and watching it, you will see it is disappearing. Once the anger has disappeared there is silence. There is no self, no observer, and nothing to be observed; there is silence. This silence is brought by vipassana, Buddha’s method of awareness.
Ordinary man does both: he goes on changing gear – sometimes he observes the self, sometimes he observes the content. He goes on moving from this to that, he is a constant wavering. Gurdjieff says that you must be settled in the observer, Buddha says look at the observed.
My own approach is different from both. My approach is that Gurdjieff’s method is more dangerous than Buddha’s method, but even in Buddha’s method there is bound to be some tension – the effort to watch. The very effort to watch will make you tense.
A Buddhist monk was brought to me from Sri Lanka. He was unable to sleep – for three years he had not slept. All kinds of medications had been tried upon him but nothing was helping, no tranquilizer was of any help. Nobody had bothered that he went on doing vipassana, Buddha’s method of insight – nobody had thought about it. When he came to me, the first thing I asked him was, “Are you doing vipassana?” Because he was a Buddhist monk, he must be doing it. He said, “Yes, for three years.” I said, “That is the cause of your sleeplessness.”
If you are continuously making an effort to watch, then in the night you will not be able to relax and fall into sleep – the watching will become continuous. And if you are even watching in the night, how can you fall asleep? You cannot relax, the tension has become fixed. It is a known fact that Buddhist monks sleep only three or four hours at the most. It is not a gain. They think, and others also think, that this is a gain – that they have attained something, they sleep only three or four hours. It is not. They are losing something very valuable – relaxation. And they will look tense; on their faces they will look tense. They will look very quiet, but tense. They will look very silent, but their silence is not the silence of relaxation, but of effort. You can see the effort in the corner, defining them.
My own method is: you relax. Neither watch the watcher nor watch the watched. Just relax, be passive; if something floats by and you cannot help seeing it, see it, but don’t make any effort to see it deliberately. If you are relaxed like a mirror, if some cloud passes by it will be reflected. Be like a mirror – lucid, passive. Drop both the Gurdjieffian method of self-remembering and the Buddhist method of watching.
If you have to choose between Gurdjieff and Buddha, choose Buddha. If you have to choose between Buddha and me, choose me.
Relax, just see things; and there is nothing much to see – if you miss something, it is not of any worth. You can miss, you are allowed to miss; take life easy, take it easy.
So people who have been in some kind of effort – and Gurdjieff’s work is of great effort – will be puzzled here. That’s why Lewis is puzzled, a bit confused, and sooner or later, he has to either understand me or to condemn me – both are open. Condemnation will be easier because for thirty years working hard… And now suddenly he has become attracted to a man who does not believe in effort at all, who does not believe in improvement, who does not believe in growth, who does not believe in going anywhere, who does not believe in any way.
He says, “The Fourth Way, as taught by Gurdjieff…” What I am teaching here is: no way. There is really no way, because truth is not a goal. All ways lead away from where we are. All roads, all ways, all paths, distract you from truth. There is nowhere to go, and nobody to go either. There is no way of being here and now but to be here and now. When I say “Be here and now,” don’t ask how. The “how” will take you away. When I say “Be here and now,” don’t ask “What is the way to be here and now?” There is no way of being here and now but to be here and now. There is no way to be still, and no need of any way. To see, wholly to see, that there is no way, is at once to be still. Seeing that, is stillness. All ways lead everywhere but here.
To live one’s life as it comes and goes is awareness: passive, lucid, mirror-like, with no tension. I don’t teach you attention because attention has the word tension in it, and the phenomenon of attention has the feeling of tension in it – hence the word attention. Enjoy, relax. Just understanding that there is nowhere to go is liberation. Liberation is not like a goal waiting for you somewhere else: liberation is understanding that you are already liberated.
It is impious for us to assert so flatly what should be, in the face of what is. What is, is the truth. Yatha bhutam: that which is, is the truth. To assert what should be is impious, sacrilegious, it is a sin; “should” is a sin. That which is – relax with it, float with it. I don’t even teach swimming, I simply say float with it. It is our responsibility to know how to accept and live through that which is.
So I don’t teach any way – fourth or fifth or sixth, and I don’t teach conscience; I teach a lucid relaxed consciousness. Out of that, many flowerings happen; out of that, many songs are born, but they are born on their own. You cannot be the doer of them and you cannot feel enhanced, that “I have done.” You cannot feel your ego fulfilled through them. The more those flowers will come, the more you will disappear. One day there is flowering, but you are not; that is the day, the moment of liberation.
The fifth question:
Osho,
I want to commit suicide.
Then first take sannyas, and you may not need to commit suicide because sannyas is the greatest suicide possible.
Why should one want to commit suicide? Death is coming on its own. Why are you in such a hurry? Death will come, it always comes. Even if you don’t want it to come, it comes; you need not go to meet it, it comes uninvited.
You must be missing your life badly. It is out of anger, out of desperation, that you want to commit suicide. I will teach you the real suicide: become a sannyasin. The ordinary suicide will not help much, you will be born immediately into some other womb somewhere. Some foolish couple will be making love somewhere, remember, and you will be trapped again. You cannot escape so easily – there are fools and fools. Before you escape from this body you will be caught in another net, again you will have to go to school and college and university – just think of that! Think of all those miserable experiences and that will prevent you from committing suicide.
Indians don’t commit suicide so easily because they know that they will be born again. In the West, much suicide, and the suicidal idea exists; many people commit suicide, and psychoanalysts say there are very, very rare people who don’t think of committing it. In fact one person has investigated and gathered data, and he says that every person, every single person thinks at least four times in his life of committing suicide. He must be thinking of the West; in the East nobody wants to commit suicide because of the idea of reincarnation. What is the point? You escape from this door and from another door you are in again; you can’t go so easily.
I will teach you real suicide: you can go forever. That’s what it means to become a buddha – to go forever. When somebody used to commit this suicide in samadhi, Buddha had a special name for him; he would call him anagamin – one who will not return, one who has gone to the farthest shore and will not be coming back. I can make you anagamin, a nonreturner; then no womb can be a trap for you again.
Why do you want to commit suicide? Maybe life is not going the way you want it to go? But who are you to impose your way on life, your will on life? Maybe your desires are not fulfilled? Then drop desires, why drop yourself? Maybe your expectations are not fulfilled, and you are feeling frustrated? In frustration one wants to destroy, and there are only two possibilities – either murder somebody or murder yourself. Murdering somebody else is more dangerous so people start thinking of murdering themselves; but it is murder.
Why not change your life rather than destroying it? And please don’t commit it here, otherwise you will create problems for me.
I have heard…
A policeman saw a man standing on the parapet of Blackfriars Bridge one evening, obviously about to jump. Rushing over to him, he tried to talk him out of it.
“If you jump, sir,” he said, “it will be my duty to jump in after you to try to rescue you. Then I’ll get wet, catch pneumonia, and die too. So why don’t you just go home quietly and put your head in the gas oven?”
Please don’t create any trouble here. And don’t talk about it because there are many people who would like the idea – you may convert a few people.
I have heard…
A man was walking across Waterloo Bridge late one night when he noticed another man on the parapet about to throw himself over. He rushed up to the would-be suicide and shouted, “Wait a minute! Don’t jump! Come and have a drink and talk things over.”
The two men went off to a nearby pub and spent the next hour chatting over the state of the country, inflation, taxes, and the future of Western civilization. Then they finished their drinks, walked back to Waterloo Bridge, and both jumped.
So don’t spread this idea here. If you want to commit suicide just come in the evening to darshan and I will help you.
The sixth question:
Osho,
I love ordinary life. It is like daytime in which I feel more and more awake. But I often have the sense that there is a universe of mysteries that belongs in darkness and is unavailable to me. Esoteric teachings, symbols, “higher knowledge,” seem to point to these mysteries, but I can never get interested in the books. I would rather journey into the night. Can you talk about this please?
There is no other life than this ordinary life. Because people are incapable of living this ordinary life, they invent esoteric things. These are the people who are incapable of living – they distract their minds and beings. All esoteric teachings and all hidden teachings and all those so-called mysteries are just mumbo jumbo.
The mystery is here. The mystery is in the trees and in the rocks and in the birds. The mystery is in people – in you, in me. The mystery is in relating, the mystery is in singing, the mystery is in dancing, the mystery is in love, the mystery is in prayer. Avoid all that nonsense literature which goes in the name of esotericism; it is pathological. These are the people who are incapable of tasting this life, they have to find some excuses, alibis, to avoid this life. They cannot enjoy, they cannot be passionately in it. They don’t have passion, they don’t have intensity of life, they don’t know how to live. They have forgotten all – how to be natural and spontaneous. Now they have to find some way to pretend that this life is not worth living, the grapes are sour – there are other grapes, hidden grapes, which only they and their inner circle knows.
Theosophy and anthroposophy and Masonic lodges – all kinds of nonsense goes on. Avoid it, it is against life. This is the only life there is, the only dance there is. The really enlightened people have known the extraordinariness of this life.
A man asked a Zen master: “Since you have become enlightened what changes happened in your life?”
The master said: “Before I became enlightened I used to chop wood and carry water from the well.”
And the man asked: “Now that you have become enlightened what do you do? What changes have happened?”
He said: “I chop wood and I carry water from the well.”
But the man was puzzled. “Then,” he said, “what is the difference? It is the same thing.”
The master laughed. He said, “It is not the same thing. Before, I used to chop wood and think a thousand and one thoughts. Now I simply chop wood. It is so beautiful just to chop wood and do nothing. Before, I used to have a thousand and one desires while drawing water from the well. Now I simply draw water, and to tell you the truth, there is no one inside me who is drawing the water. When I am chopping the wood it is wonderful because there is nobody in me chopping the wood; I have disappeared! The wood is being chopped and the water is being carried, and it is tremendously beautiful.”
The ordinary life becomes extraordinary if you live it totally, fully. Avoid esotericism. They are dangerous things; you can become hooked on them and then you will be just in mind-trips, imagination. If you love imagination it is okay, if you love fantasizing it is okay. You can create your own planes and your own astral travels and subtle bodies and whatever you want.
A young woman dreamed that Prince Charming had come on his horse. A beautiful horse and beautiful prince… She had been waiting for this Prince Charming forever and ever, and he had come. When you wait too much, beware – it happens.
The prince took the woman on the horse and the horse started galloping toward some unknown destination, and the woman was thrilled – who would not be thrilled? She asked the prince, “Where are you taking me?” and the prince said, “This is your dream. So you say to me where you want to be taken. This is your dream.”
In these so-called esoteric trips, wherever you are going it is your dream. Masters will appear – Koot Humi and K.H. – and automatic handwriting will appear, and messages will be received from the beyond. All sheer nonsense: eat your breakfast and have a good sleep.
The seventh question:
Osho,
Why do people like Buddha or Christ appear only at certain times?
Because they are afraid of you: they think a lot before they gather enough courage to come back to this earth to be again crucified by you, to be again stoned by you.
And sometimes, even if they come, they live here anonymously so that you cannot stone and you cannot crucify them. Then everything happens in its own time. When the spring comes, trees will bloom; and when the right time comes, the fruits will ripen. Every moment things are happening, but nothing ever happens for which the moment has not come. Everything has its own time, and it is good.
On the planet Volcanus, the gases from the many volcanoes which supplied the nuclear lighting were running out. It was a race against time to find another way of lighting the planet.
Suddenly they were plunged into total darkness.
The people of Volcanus were terrified. Just then they heard a slippery slurpery noise, and rays of light appeared at the top of all volcanoes. The lights got brighter and brighter, lighting the whole of the planet.
“We are saved,” shouted the people. “The glow worms from inside the volcanoes are giving us the light we need.”
The glow worms got closer.
“But why haven’t you shone before?” asked the people.
“We weren’t needed,” said the leader of the glow worms. “But when the planet was plunged into total darkness, we decided that the time was right. Because when you gotta glow, you gotta glow.”
Enough for today.