Tantric Transformation

Art work by Frank Kliewer;
http://artandzen.com

Osho, The love in me is dependent on the outside world. At the same time I see what you say about being complete within. What happens to love if there is nothing and nobody to recognize and taste it? Who are you without disciples?
The first thing: There are two kinds of love...C. S. Lewis has divided love into these two kinds: ’need-love’ and ’gift-love’. Abraham Maslow also divides love into two kinds. The first he calls ’deficiency-love’ and the second he calls ’being-love’. The distinction is significant and has to be understood. The need-love or the deficiency-love depends on the other; it is immature love. In fact it is not truly love, it is a need. You use the other, you use the other as a means; you exploit, you manipulate, you dominate. But the other is reduced, the other is almost destroyed. And exactly the same is being done by the other. He is trying to manipulate you, to dominate you, to possess you, to use you. To use another human being is very unloving, so it only appears like love; it is a false coin. But this is what happens to almost ninety-nine percent of people, because the first lesson of love that you learn is in your childhood. A child is born, he depends on the mother. His love towards the mother is a deficiency-love: he needs the mother, he cannot survive without the mother. He loves the mother because mother is his life. In fact, there is no love, he will love any woman whosoever will protect him, whosoever will help him to survive, whosoever will fill up his need. The mother is a sort of food that he eats. It is not only milk that he gets from the mother, it is love too and that too is a need. Millions of people remain childish all their lives, they never grow up. They grow in age, but they never grow in their minds; their psychology remains juvenile, immature. They are always needing love, they are hankering for it like food.
Man becomes mature the moment he starts loving rather than needing. He starts overflowing, sharing; he starts giving. The emphasis is totally different. With the first, the emphasis is on how to get more. With the second, the emphasis is on how to give how to give more and how to give unconditionally. This is growth, maturity, coming to you.
A mature person gives. Only a mature person can give, because only a mature person has it. Then love is not dependent, then you can be loving whether the other is or is not. Then love is not a relationship, it is a state. What will happen if all the disciples disappear and only I am here? Do you think there will be any change? What happens when a flower blooms in the deep forest with nobody to appreciate it, nobody to know its fragrance, nobody to pass a comment and say ”beautiful”; nobody to taste its beauty, its joy, nobody to share what happens to the flower? It dies? It suffers? It becomes panicky? It commits suicide? It goes on blooming, it simply goes on blooming. It does not make any difference; whether somebody passes by or not is irrelevant. It goes on spreading its fragrance to the winds, it goes on offering its joy to God, to the whole. If I am alone, then too I will be as loving as when I am with you. It is not you who are creating my love. If you are creating my love then, naturally, when you are gone my love will be gone. You are not pulling my love out, I am showering it on you: it is gift-love, it is being-love.
And I don’t really agree with C. S. Lewis and Abraham Maslow, because the first love that they call ’love’ is not love, it is a need. How can a need be love? Love is a luxury. It is abundance, it is having so much life that you don’t know what to do with it, so you share. It is having so many songs in your heart that you have to sing them; whether anybody listens or not is not relevant. If nobody listens, then also you will have to sing it, you will have to dance your dance.
The other can have it, the other can miss it, but as far as you are concerned it is flowing, it is overflowing. Rivers don’t flow for you, they are flowing whether you are there or not. They don’t flow for your thirst, they don’t flow for your thirsty fields; they are simply flowing there. You can quench your thirst, you can miss; that’s up to you. The river was not really flowing for you, the river was just flowing. It is accidental that you can get the water for your field, it is accidental that you can get water for your needs. A master is a river, the disciple is accidental. The master is flowing; you can partake, you can enjoy, you can share his being. You can be overwhelmed by him, but he is not for you; he is not flowing for you in particular, he is simply flowing. Remember this. And this I call mature love, real love, authentic love, true love.

When you depend on the other there is always misery. The moment you depend you start feeling miserable, because dependence is slavery. Then you start taking revenge in subtle ways, because the person you have to depend upon becomes powerful over you. Nobody likes anybody to be powerful over them, nobody likes to be dependent, because dependence kills freedom. And love cannot flower in dependence, love is a flower of free-dom; it needs space, it needs absolute space. The other has not to interfere with it. It is very delicate. When you are dependent, certainly the other will dominate you, and you will try to dominate the other. That’s the fight that goes on between so-called lovers: they are intimate enemies, continuously fighting. Husbands and wives what are they doing? Loving is very rare, fighting is the rule; loving is exceptional. And in every way they try to dominate; even through love they try to dominate. If the husband asks the wife, the wife denies, she is reluctant, she is very miserly. She gives, but very reluctantly; she wants you to wave your tail around her. And so is the case with the husband. When the wife is in need and asks him, the husband says that he is tired. In the office there was too much work ”really overworked” and he would like to go to sleep. I have read one letter written by Mulla Nasruddin to his wife. Listen to it.... To my dear, ever-loving wife.
During the past year I have tried to make love to you 365 times, an average of once per day, and the following is a list of the reasons you gave for rejecting me:
Wrong week, 11 times
It will wake the children, 7 times
It is too hot, 15 times
It is too cold, 3 times
Too tired, 19 times
Too late, 16 times
Too early, 9 times
Pretending to sleep, 33 times
The window is open, neighbors might hear, 3 times
Backache, 16 times
Toothache, 2 times Headache, 6 times
Not in the mood, 31 times
Baby restless, might cry, 18 times
Watched late show, 15 times
Mud-pack, 8 times
Grease on face, 4 times
Too drunk, 7 times
Forgot to visit the chemist’s, 10 times
Visitors sleeping in the next room, 7 times
Just had hair done, 28 times
”Is that all you think about?” 62 times
Dearest, do you think we can improve on our record during the forthcoming year? Your ever-loving husband,
Mulla Nasruddin.
These are ways to manipulate, to starve the other to make him more and more hungry so that he becomes more and more dependent.
Naturally women are more diplomatic about it than men, because man is already powerful. He need not find subtle and cunning ways to be powerful, he is powerful. He manages the money that is his power. Muscularly he is stronger that is his power. Down the centuries he has conditioned the mind of the woman that he is more powerful and she is not powerful. In every way he has always tried to find a woman who is in every way less than him. A man does not want to be married to a woman who is more educated than him, because then the power is at stake. He does not want to marry a woman who is taller than him, because a taller woman looks superior. A man does not want to marry a woman who is too much of an intellectual, because then she argues, and argument can destroy power. A man does not want a woman who is very famous, because then he becomes secondary. And down the centuries man has asked for a woman who is younger than him. Why? why can’t the wife be older than you? What is wrong? But an older woman is more experienced; that destroys power. So man has always asked for a lesser, in every way a lesser woman. That’s why women have lost their height. There is no reason for them to be of lesser height than men, no reason at all; they have lost their height only because the smaller woman was always chosen. By and by the thing has entered in their minds so deeply that they have lost their height. They have lost their intelligence, because an intelligent woman was not needed; an intelligent woman was a freak. You will be surprised to know that just in this century their height is increasing again. And you will be surprised...even their bones are becoming bigger and their skeleton is becoming bigger. Just within fifty years...particularly in America. And their mind is also growing and becoming bigger than it used to be; their skull is becoming bigger. With the idea of freedom, some deep conditioning has been destroyed. Man already has power so he need not be very clever, need not be very indirect. Women don’t have power. When you don’t have power you have to be more diplomatic that is a substitute. The only way they can feel powerful is that they are needed, that the man is continuously in need of them. This is not love, this is a bargain. And they are continuously haggling over the price, it is a continuous struggle. C. S. Lewis and Abraham Maslow divide love in two. I don’t divide in two. I say that the first kind of love is just a name, a pseudo coin, it is not true. Only the second kind of love is love. Love happens only when you are mature. You become capable of loving only when you are a grown-up. When you know that love is not a need but an overflow being-love or gift-love then you give without any conditions. The first kind, the so-called love, derives from a person’s deep need for another, while gift-love or being-love flows or overflows from one mature person to another out of abundance; one is flooded with it. You have it and it starts moving around you, just as when you light a lamp rays start spreading into the darkness. Love is a by-product of being. When you are, you have the aura of love around you; when you are not, you don’t have that aura around you. And when you don’t have that aura around you, you ask the other to give love to you. Let it be repeated: When you don’t have love you ask the other to give it to you, you are a beggar. And the other is asking you to give it to him or to her. Now, two beggars spreading their hands before each other, and both are hoping that the other has it... naturally both feel defeated finally and both feel cheated. You can ask any husband and any wife, you can ask any lover; they both feel cheated. It was your projection that the other had it. If you have a wrong projection, what can the other do about it? Your projection has been broken; the other did not prove according to your projection, that’s all. But the other has no obligation to prove his being according to your expectations.
And you have cheated the other...that is the feeling of the other, because the other was hoping that love would be flowing from you. You both were hoping love would be flowing from the other, and both were empty. How can love happen? At the most you can be miserable together. Before you used to be miserable alone, separate; now you can be miserable together. And remember, whenever two persons are miserable together, it is not a simple addition, it is a multiplication. Alone you were feeling frustrated, now you feel frustrated together. One thing is good about it: that now you can throw the responsibility on the other that the other is making you miserable. That is the good point. You can feel at ease, that ”Nothing is wrong with me...the other.... What to do with such a wife nasty, nagging?” One has to be miserable. ”What to do with such a husband? ugly, a miser.” Now you can throw the responsibility on the other; you have found a scapegoat. But misery remains, becomes multiplied. Now this is the paradox: those who fall in love don’t have any love, that’s why they fall in love. And because they don’t have any love they cannot give. And one thing more: an immature person always falls in love with another immature person, because only they can understand each other’s language. A mature person loves a mature person, an immature person loves an immature person.
You can go on changing your husband or your wife a thousand and one times, you will again find the same type of woman and the same misery: repeated in different forms, but the same misery repeated it is almost the same. You can change your wife, but you are not changed. Now who is going to choose the other wife? You will choose. The choice will come out of your immaturity again. You will choose a similar type of woman again. The basic problem of love is to first become mature; then you will find a mature partner, then immature people will not attract you at all. It is just like that. If you are twenty-five years of age you don’t fall in love with a baby two years old...you don’t fall. Exactly like that, when you are a mature person psychologically, spiritually, you don’t fall in love with a baby. It does not happen, it cannot happen. You can see that it is going to be meaningless.
In fact a mature person does not fall in love, he rises in love. The word fall is not right. Only immature people fall, they stumble and fall down in love. Somehow they were managing and standing. They cannot manage and they cannot stand they find a woman and they are gone, they find a man and they are gone. They were always ready to fall on the ground and to creep. They don’t have the backbone, the spine...they don’t have that integrity to stand alone.
A mature person has the integrity to be alone. And when a mature person gives love, he gives without any strings attached to it: he simply gives. And when a mature person gives love, he feels grateful that you have accepted his love, not vice versa. He does not expect you to be thankful for it no, not at all, he does not even need your thanks. He thanks you for accepting his love.
And when two mature persons are in love, one of the greatest paradoxes of life happens, one of the most beautiful phenomena: they are together and yet tremendously alone, they are together so much so that they are almost one. But their oneness does not destroy their individuality; in fact, it enhances it: they become more individual. Two mature persons in love help each other to become more free. There is no politics involved, no diplomacy, no effort to dominate. How can you dominate the person you love? Just think over it. Domination is a sort of hatred, anger, enmity. How can you even think of dominating a person you love? You would love to see the person totally free, independent; you will give him more individuality. That’s why I call it the greatest paradox: they are together so much so that they are almost one, but still in that oneness they are individuals. Their individualities are not effaced; they have become more enhanced. The other has enriched them as far as their freedom is concerned.
Immature people falling in love destroy each other’s freedom, create a bondage, make a prison. Mature persons in love help each other to be free; they help each other to destroy all sorts of bondages. And when love flows with freedom there is beauty. When love flows with dependence there is ugliness. Remember, freedom is a higher value than love. That’s why, in India, the ultimate we call moksha. Moksha means freedom. Freedom is a higher value than love. So if love is destroying freedom, it is not of worth. Love can be dropped, freedom has to be saved; freedom is a higher value. And without freedom you can never be happy, that is not possible. Freedom is the intrinsic desire of each man, each woman utter freedom, absolute freedom. So anything that becomes destructive to freedom, one starts hating it. Don’t you hate the man you love? Don’t you hate the woman you love? You hate; it is a necessary evil, you have to tolerate it. Because you cannot be alone you have to manage to be with somebody, and you have to adjust to the other’s demands. You have to tolerate, you have to bear them.
Love, to be really love, has to be being-love, gift-love. Being-love means a state of love. When you have arrived home, when you have known who you are, then a love arises in your being. Then the fragrance spreads and you can give it to others.
How can you give something which you don’t have?
To give it, the first basic requirement is to have it.
You ask: ”The love in me is dependent on the outside world....” Then it is not love; or if you want to play with words like C. S. Lewis and A. H. Maslow, then call it need-love, deficiency-love. It is like calling a disease a healthy-disease it is meaningless, it is a contradiction in terms. Deficiency-love is a contradiction in terms. But if you are too attached to the word love it is okay; you can call it deficiency-love or need-love. ”At the same time I see what you say about being complete within....” No, you cannot see it yet. You hear me, you understand it intellectually, but you cannot see it yet. In fact I am speaking one language and you understand a different language. I am shouting from one plane and you are listening at a different plane. Yes, I am using the same words you use, but I am not like you so how can I give those words the same meaning as you give them? Intellectually you can understand and that will be a misunderstanding.
All intellectual understanding is a misunderstanding.
Let me tell you a few anecdotes.
A Frenchman who was visiting Ireland entered a compartment of a train, and in the carriage were two Irishmen who were commercial travelers. One of these said to the other, ”And where have ye been lately?” Came the reply, ”Sure and haven’t I just been to Kilmary and now I am off to Kilpatrick. What about yerself?” To which the first replied, ”I have been to Kilkenny and Kilmichael and now I am off to Kilmore.” The Frenchman listened in amazement. ”Murdering scoun-drels!” he thought, and got out at the next station. Now listen: Kil-mary, Kil-patrick, Kil-kenny, Kil-michael and Kil-more. Kill more...the Frenchman must have got frightened. ”Murdering scoundrels!”
Something exactly like this continuously goes on happening. I say something, you understand something else. But it is natural; I am not condemning it, I am simply making you aware of it. There were three boys, one called Trouble, one called Manners, and one called Mindyourownbusiness. The father was a philosopher so he had given them very meaningful names. Now, it is very dangerous to give people meaningful names....
Trouble got lost, so Manners and Mindyourownbusiness went to the police station. Mindyourownbusiness said to Manners, ”Now you wait here outside,” and in he went.
Inside he said to the copper at the desk, ”My friend’s lost.”

The copper said, ”What’s your name?”
”Mindyourownbusiness.”
”Where’s your manners?” said the copper.
”Outside on the doorstep.”
”Are you looking for trouble?”
”Yes, have you seen him?”
This goes on continuously. I say that until you are total within yourself, love will not flow. Of course you understand the words, but you give those words your own meaning. When I say, ”Unless you are total within yourself...” I am not proposing a theory, I am not philosophizing at all; I am simply indicating a fact of life. I am saying: How can you give if you don’t have? How can you overflow when you are empty? And love is an overflow. When you have more than you need, only then can you give; hence it is a gift-love. How can you give gifts when you don’t have? This you hear and you understand, but then the problem arises because the un-derstanding is intellectual. If it has penetrated your being, if you have seen the facticity of it, then the question will not arise. Then you will forget all your dependent relationships and you will start working on your own being: clearing, cleansing, making your inner core more alert, aware; you will start working that way. And the more you start feeling that you are coming to a certain totality, the more you will find that side by side love is growing it is a by-product.
Love is a function of being total...then the question will not be there. But the question is there, so you have not seen the fact. You have listened to it as a theory and you have understood it, you have understood the logic of it. To understand the logic is not enough, you will have to have the taste of it. ”The love in me is dependent on the outside world. At the same time I see what you say about being complete within. What happens to love if there is nothing and nobody to recognize and taste it?” It need not be recognized: it needs no recognition, it needs no certificates, it needs nobody to taste it. The recognition of the other is accidental, it is not essential to love; love will go on flowing. Nobody tastes it, nobody recognizes it, nobody feels happy, delighted, because of it love will go on flowing, because in the very flow you feel tremendously blissful, you feel tremendously rejoicing.
In the very flow, when your energy is flowing.... You are sitting in an empty room and the energy is flowing and filling the empty room with your love. Nobody is there the walls will not say, ”Thank you” nobody to recognize, nobody to taste it. But that doesn’t matter at all. Your energy releasing, flowing...you will feel happy. The flower is happy when the fragrance is released to the winds; whether the winds know about it or not is not the point. And you ask: ”Who are you without your disciples?”
I am that I am. Whether disciples are there or not, that is irrelevant; I am not dependent on you. And my whole effort here is that you can also become independent of me.
I am here to give you freedom. I don’t want to impose anything on you, I don’t want to cripple you in any way; I want you just to be yourselves. And the day it happens that you are independent of me, you will be able to really love me not before it.
I love you. I cannot help it. It is not a question of whether I can love you or not, I simply love you. If you are not here, this Chuang Tzu auditorium will be full of my love; it will not make any difference. These trees will still get my love, these birds will go on getting it. And even if all trees and all birds disappear, that doesn’t make any difference; the love will still be flowing. Love is, so love flows.
Love is a dynamic energy, it cannot be stagnant. If somebody partakes, good. If nobody partakes, that too is good. What God said to Moses...do you remember? When Moses encountered God, of course God gave him a few messages to deliver to his people.
And Moses was a true Jew, he asked, ”Sir, but please tell me your name! They will ask, ’Who has given you these messages?’” they will ask God’s name. ”So what is your name?” And God said, ”I am that I am. You go to your people and say that ’I am that I am’ says so. It is a message from ’I am that I am.’” It looks very absurd but is of tremendous significance: I am that I am. God has no name, no definition, just being.

Question 2

The second question:
Osho, I don’t go anywhere. Why is a map needed? Isn’t being herenow enough? Yes, there is no goal and nowhere to go. And the map is not needed if you have understood me. But you have not understood me and the map is needed. And the need of the map is not because there is a goal, it is not to go somewhere that the map is needed; the map is needed because you have gone somewhere and you have to come back to the herenow. It is not needed to go somewhere, but you have dreamed that you have gone somewhere; the map is needed to come back home. You have gone astray, you have moved in your imagination, in your desire, in your ambition; you don’t look at yourself. Your being is at your back and you are rushing away. The map is needed to look back, to meet your being, to encounter yourself.
But if you understand me that here and now is all that is you can burn the map, you can throw the map; then the map is not needed for you. For one who has arrived home the map is not needed. But don’t burn the map until you have arrived home.
There is a famous painting of a Zen monk burning Buddhist scriptures. Somebody asks him, ”Master, what are you doing? And you have always taught these scriptures, and you have always been commenting on and reflecting upon these scriptures why are you burning them?”
And the master laughs and he says, ”Because I have come home, so the map is not needed.” But you should not burn them unless and until you have come home. You carry a map: it is meaningful while you are away; when you have arrived you throw it. If you throw it before you have arrived you will be in danger. Yes, here and now is more than enough not enough, more than enough it is all that there is. But you are not herenow, so all these maps are needed to bring you home. You have not gone anywhere really, but you are dreaming that you have gone somewhere. These maps are also dream maps. Remember, these maps are dream maps; these maps are as false as your samsara, as your world.
The ultimate scripture has no word in it. The Sufis have a book, The Book of the Books. It is simply empty, not a single word written in it. Down the centuries it has been given from one master to another, handed over from the master to the disciple, and has been kept with tremendous respect. That is the ultimate in scriptures. The Vedas are not so beautiful, the Bible is not so beautiful because something is written there. The Book of the Books is really of tremendous value, but will you be able to read it? When for the first time in the West the Sufis wanted it to be published, no publisher was ready. ”What? There is nothing to publish!” they would say. ”It will be just an empty book. What to publish it for?”
The Western mind can understand the word, the black ink spread on the white page; it cannot see the white page directly. The white page does not exist for the Western mind, only the black ink. The clouds exist for the Western mind, not the sky: mind exists for the Western mind, not consciousness. Content exists, but they have completely forgotten the container.
Thoughts are just like black ink on white paper; thoughts are just the written message. When thoughts disappear, you will become The Book of the Books empty. But that is the voice of God. You say: ”I don’t go anywhere. Why is a map needed? Isn’t being herenow enough?” Just because you ask the question, you will still need the map: a question is a question for the map. If you have understood me, there is no question left. Then what is there to be asked? Here and now is enough. What is there to ask? What can you ask about the here and now? All asking is asking about the goals of somewhere else, then and there.
Question 3
The third question: Osho, I have been married for twenty years already and that ”Why can’t she understand?” feeling is there. And then I have never seen her in my life, and then I am in the middle of a honeymoon, and then.... My mind goes bananas!
Mind always goes bananas that is the way of the mind.The mind is a flux, it continuously changes; it is not the same for any two consecutive moments, each moment it is different. Yes, one moment you feel that you have not seen your wife in your whole life, you have not met her yet, although you have been living with her for twenty years. Another moment you see yourself just in the middle of a honeymoon you have seen her beauty, her grace, her joy, her innermost core and then it is gone. And the scene goes on changing. The mind is very slippery. It goes on slipping, it cannot stay anywhere. It has no capacity to stand; it is a flux. With the mind everything is like that: one moment you are happy, another moment you are unhappy; one moment you are so joyful, another moment you are so sad...it goes on and on, the wheel of the mind goes on moving. One moment one spoke is on top, another moment another spoke has come to the top, and it goes on this way. That’s why in the East we call it samsara, the wheel. The world is a wheel, it goes on moving the same wheel, again and again and again, and it is not stable for a single moment. It is like a movie: if the movie stops for a single moment you will be able to see the screen. But the movie goes on moving and it is moving so fast and you are so engrossed in it, so occupied with it, that you cannot see the screen. And the screen is the reality. The pictures projected upon it are just dreams. Mind goes on projecting. I have heard....
A millionaire entered a post office and saw an elderly couple standing at the counter drawing their old-age pensions. He was in a good mood; he felt very sorry for the old couple and he thought they should be given one week’s holiday to know the beauties and the joys of life...he was in a charitable mood. Going up to them he said, ”How would you like to spend a week at my residence? I will give you both a wonderful time.” Well, the old couple agreed, and so the millionaire took them off to his house in his Rolls and, as he had promised, saw that they had a really good holiday with excellent food, color television and many luxuries which they never dreamed they would ever have. At the end of the week he walked into the library where the old boy was enjoying a quiet time with a glass of wine and smoking a cigar. ”Well,” he said, ”have you enjoyed yourself?” ”Indeed I have,” the old boy replied. ”But can I ask you a question?” ”Certainly,” replied the millionaire.
”Then” said the other, ”who’s the old woman I have been sleeping with all week?” This will be the situation of people who have lived with their wife, with their husband, their whole lives. Who is the woman you have been sleeping with for twenty years? There are moments when you feel you know. There are moments when suddenly there is a China Wall, opaque, dark you cannot see anything, you don’t know who this stranger here is.
All our knowing is so superficial; we remain strangers. You can sleep with the woman for twenty years that doesn’t make much difference, you remain strangers. And the reason is that you don’t even know yourself, how can you know the other? It is impossible, you are hoping for the impossible. You don’t even know yourself! You don’t know the man you are and you have been here in existence for eternity. Millions of lives you have been here and you don’t know yet who you are, so what to say about twenty years? And how can you know the other, the woman who is far away from you? You cannot enter into her dreams, you cannot enter into her thoughts, you cannot enter into her desires how can you know her being? Even dreams you cannot know. You may be sleeping with the same woman for twenty years in the same bed, but she dreams her dreams, you dream your dreams; your subjectivities remain worlds apart. Even while you are making love to a woman and holding her in your hands, are you really holding the woman who is there or are you holding just an imagination, a projection, a shadow? Are you really holding the real woman in your hands, or just a mind image, a ghost? Do you love this woman who is there, or do you have certain ideas that you love and you find those ideas reflected in this woman? When there are two persons in a bed, my feeling is that there are always four persons: two ghosts lying just in between the two the woman’s projection of the husband and the husband’s projection of the wife.
It is not accidental that the husband goes on trying to change the wife according to some ideal, and the wife goes on changing trying, at least, to change the husband according to some ideal. Those are the two ghosts. You can’t accept the woman as she is, can you? You have many improvements to make, many changes. And if it were really possible...if one day God comes to the world and says, ”Okay. Now all wives are allowed to change their husbands as they want,” or, ”All husbands are allowed to change their wives as they want,” what will happen, do you know? The world will simply go crazy. If women are allowed to change their husbands, you will not find a single man left that you can recognize. All old people will be gone. If husbands are allowed to change their wives, then no single woman here will be left as she was. And do you think you will be happy? You will not be, because then the woman that you have changed and made according to your ideas will not appeal to you; she will not have a mystery in her.
Look at the absurdities of the mind, the demands of the mind suicidal demands. If you are able to change your husband and you really become powerful enough to change him totally, will you love that man? He will be just something put together by you. He will not have any mystery, he will not have any soul, he will not have any integrity of his own, and he will not have anything to be explored by you. You will lose interest, you will be bored by him; it will be just ’homemade’. What interest? Interest arises only because there is something unknown to be explored, a mystery, an invocation challenging you to move into the unfamiliar. The first thing: you have not known yourself, how can you know your wife? not possible. Start by knowing yourself. And this is the beauty of it: the day you know yourself, you will know all. Not only your wife, you will know the whole existence; not only man, but trees and birds and animals, and the rocks and the rivers and the mountains. You will know all because you contain all; you are a miniature universe. And another beauty, another incredible experience, is that the moment you know yourself, the mystery is not finished. In fact for the first time, the mystery becomes tremendous. You know, and yet you know that much is there to be known. You know, and yet you know that this knowledge is nothing. You know, and yet the boundary is far away. You only enter into the ocean of knowledge, you never reach the other shore. That moment the whole existence is mysterious: your wife, your child, your friend. And that knowledge is not destructive of the magic, of the poetry of life; that knowledge enhances the poetry, the magic, the miracle, the mystery.

”I have been married for twenty years already, and that ’Why can’t she understand?’ feeling is there.” Do you understand yourself? Have you not been doing things for which you repent later on? and you say, ”I have done it in spite of myself.” Do you understand yourself? Do you do things through understanding? When somebody hits you and you become angry, are you becoming angry with understanding? or just because he has pushed your button?
Your knowledge about yourself is so superficial...it is just like a driver, a driver driving a car. Yes, a few things he knows: he can manage the steering wheel, he can manage the accelerator, he can manage the clutch, he can manage the gearbox, he can manage the brake that’s all. Do you think he knows everything about the car? What is hidden under the bonnet is not known at all, and that is the real car; that is where the action is, that is where the real thing is happening. And what he is pushing and pulling are nothing but buttons. Sooner or later these things are going to disappear from cars. They should disappear, they are very primitive this steering wheel, this accelerator, this brake. They should disappear, they are not needed; a computer can do all that. And then even a small child can drive the car there is no need for a license really. Osho, I have been married for twenty years already and that ”Why can’t she understand?” feeling is there. And then I have never seen her in my life, and then I am in the middle of a honeymoon, and then.... My mind goes bananas! Mind always goes bananas that is the way of the mind.The mind is a flux, it continuously changes; it is not the same for any two consecutive moments, each moment it is different. Yes, one moment you feel that you have not seen your wife in your whole life, you have not met her yet, although you have been living with her for twenty years. Another moment you see yourself just in the middle of a honeymoon you have seen her beauty, her grace, her joy, her innermost core and then it is gone. And the scene goes on changing. The mind is very slippery. It goes on slipping, it cannot stay anywhere. It has no capacity to stand; it is a flux. With the mind everything is like that: one moment you are happy, another moment you are unhappy; one moment you are so joyful, another moment you are so sad...it goes on and on, the wheel of the mind goes on moving. One moment one spoke is on top, another moment another spoke has come to the top, and it goes on this way. That’s why in the East we call it samsara, the wheel. The world is a wheel, it goes on moving the same wheel, again and again and again, and it is not stable for a single moment. It is like a movie: if the movie stops for a single moment you will be able to see the screen. But the movie goes on moving and it is moving so fast and you are so engrossed in it, so occupied with it, that you cannot see the screen. And the screen is the reality. The pictures projected upon it are just dreams. Mind goes on projecting. I have heard....
A millionaire entered a post office and saw an elderly couple standing at the counter drawing their old-age pensions. He was in a good mood; he felt very sorry for the old couple and he thought they should be given one week’s holiday to know the beauties and the joys of life...he was in a charitable mood. Going up to them he said, ”How would you like to spend a week at my residence? I will give you both a wonderful time.” Well, the old couple agreed, and so the millionaire took them off to his house in his Rolls and, as he had promised, saw that they had a really good holiday with excellent food, color television and many luxuries which they never dreamed they would ever have. At the end of the week he walked into the library where the old boy was enjoying a quiet time with a glass of wine and smoking a cigar. ”Well,” he said, ”have you enjoyed yourself?” ”Indeed I have,” the old boy replied. ”But can I ask you a question?” ”Certainly,” replied the millionaire.
”Then” said the other, ”who’s the old woman I have been sleeping with all week?” This will be the situation of people who have lived with their wife, with their husband, their whole lives. Who is the woman you have been sleeping with for twenty years? There are moments when you feel you know. There are moments when suddenly there is a China Wall, opaque, dark you cannot see anything, you don’t know who this stranger here is.
All our knowing is so superficial; we remain strangers. You can sleep with the woman for twenty years that doesn’t make much difference, you remain strangers. And the reason is that you don’t even know yourself, how can you know the other? It is impossible, you are hoping for the impossible. You don’t even know yourself! You don’t know the man you are and you have been here in existence for eternity. Millions of lives you have been here and you don’t know yet who you are, so what to say about twenty years? And how can you know the other, the woman who is far away from you? You cannot enter into her dreams, you cannot enter into her thoughts, you cannot enter into her desires how can you know her being? Even dreams you cannot know. You may be sleeping with the same woman for twenty years in the same bed, but she dreams her dreams, you dream your dreams; your subjectivities remain worlds apart.

Even while you are making love to a woman and holding her in your hands, are you really holding the woman who is there or are you holding just an imagination, a projection, a shadow? Are you really holding the real woman in your hands, or just a mind image, a ghost? Do you love this woman who is there, or do you have certain ideas that you love and you find those ideas reflected in this woman? When there are two persons in a bed, my feeling is that there are always four persons: two ghosts lying just in between the two the woman’s projection of the husband and the husband’s projection of the wife.
It is not accidental that the husband goes on trying to change the wife according to some ideal, and the wife goes on changing trying, at least, to change the husband according to some ideal. Those are the two ghosts. You can’t accept the woman as she is, can you? You have many improvements to make, many changes. And if it were really possible...if one day God comes to the world and says, ”Okay. Now all wives are allowed to change their husbands as they want,” or, ”All husbands are allowed to change their wives as they want,” what will happen, do you know? The world will simply go crazy. If women are allowed to change their husbands, you will not find a single man left that you can recognize. All old people will be gone. If husbands are allowed to change their wives, then no single woman here will be left as she was. And do you think you will be happy? You will not be, because then the woman that you have changed and made according to your ideas will not appeal to you; she will not have a mystery in her.
Look at the absurdities of the mind, the demands of the mind suicidal demands. If you are able to change your husband and you really become powerful enough to change him totally, will you love that man? He will be just something put together by you. He will not have any mystery, he will not have any soul, he will not have any integrity of his own, and he will not have anything to be explored by you. You will lose interest, you will be bored by him; it will be just ’homemade’. What interest? Interest arises only because there is something unknown to be explored, a mystery, an invocation challenging you to move into the unfamiliar. The first thing: you have not known yourself, how can you know your wife? not possible. Start by knowing yourself. And this is the beauty of it: the day you know yourself, you will know all. Not only your wife, you will know the whole existence; not only man, but trees and birds and animals, and the rocks and the rivers and the mountains. You will know all because you contain all; you are a miniature universe. And another beauty, another incredible experience, is that the moment you know yourself, the mystery is not finished. In fact for the first time, the mystery becomes tremendous. You know, and yet you know that much is there to be known. You know, and yet you know that this knowledge is nothing. You know, and yet the boundary is far away. You only enter into the ocean of knowledge, you never reach the other shore. That moment the whole existence is mysterious: your wife, your child, your friend. And that knowledge is not destructive of the magic, of the poetry of life; that knowledge enhances the poetry, the magic, the miracle, the mystery.
”I have been married for twenty years already, and that ’Why can’t she understand?’ feeling is there.” Do you understand yourself? Have you not been doing things for which you repent later on? and you say, ”I have done it in spite of myself.” Do you understand yourself? Do you do things through understanding? When somebody hits you and you become angry, are you becoming angry with understanding? or just because he has pushed your button?
Your knowledge about yourself is so superficial...it is just like a driver, a driver driving a car. Yes, a few things he knows: he can manage the steering wheel, he can manage the accelerator, he can manage the clutch, he can manage the gearbox, he can manage the brake that’s all. Do you think he knows everything about the car? What is hidden under the bonnet is not known at all, and that is the real car; that is where the action is, that is where the real thing is happening. And what he is pushing and pulling are nothing but buttons. Sooner or later these things are going to disappear from cars. They should disappear, they are very primitive this steering wheel, this accelerator, this brake. They should disappear, they are not needed; a computer can do all that. And then even a small child can drive the car there is no need for a license really. Osho, I have been married for twenty years already and that ”Why can’t she understand?” feeling is there. And then I have never seen her in my life, and then I am in the middle of a honeymoon, and then.... My mind goes bananas! Mind always goes bananas that is the way of the mind.The mind is a flux, it continuously changes; it is not the same for any two consecutive moments, each moment it is different. Yes, one moment you feel that you have not seen your wife in your whole life, you have not met her yet, although you have been living with her for twenty years. Another moment you see yourself just in the middle of a honeymoon you have seen her beauty, her grace, her joy, her innermost core and then it is gone. And the scene goes on changing. The mind is very slippery. It goes on slipping, it cannot stay anywhere. It has no capacity to stand; it is a flux. With the mind everything is like that: one moment you are happy, another moment you are unhappy; one moment you are so joyful, another moment you are so sad...it goes on and on, the wheel of the mind goes on moving. One moment one spoke is on top, another moment another spoke has come to the top, and it goes on this way. That’s why in the East we call it samsara, the wheel. The world is a wheel, it goes on moving the same wheel, again and again and again, and it is not stable for a single moment. It is like a movie: if the movie stops for a single moment you will be able to see the screen. But the movie goes on moving and it is moving so fast and you are so engrossed in it, so occupied with it, that you cannot see the screen. And the screen is the reality. The pictures projected upon it are just dreams. Mind goes on projecting. I have heard....
A millionaire entered a post office and saw an elderly couple standing at the counter drawing their old-age pensions. He was in a good mood; he felt very sorry for the old couple and he thought they should be given one week’s holiday to know the beauties and the joys of life...he was in a charitable mood. Going up to them he said, ”How would you like to spend a week at my residence? I will give you both a wonderful time.” Well, the old couple agreed, and so the millionaire took them off to his house in his Rolls and, as he had promised, saw that they had a really good holiday with excellent food, color television and many luxuries which they never dreamed they would ever have. At the end of the week he walked into the library where the old boy was enjoying a quiet time with a glass of wine and smoking a cigar. ”Well,” he said, ”have you enjoyed yourself?” ”Indeed I have,” the old boy replied. ”But can I ask you a question?” ”Certainly,” replied the millionaire.
”Then” said the other, ”who’s the old woman I have been sleeping with all week?” This will be the situation of people who have lived with their wife, with their husband, their whole lives. Who is the woman you have been sleeping with for twenty years? There are moments when you feel you know. There are moments when suddenly there is a China Wall, opaque, dark you cannot see anything, you don’t know who this stranger here is.
All our knowing is so superficial; we remain strangers. You can sleep with the woman for twenty years that doesn’t make much difference, you remain strangers. And the reason is that you don’t even know yourself, how can you know the other? It is impossible, you are hoping for the impossible. You don’t even know yourself! You don’t know the man you are and you have been here in existence for eternity. Millions of lives you have been here and you don’t know yet who you are, so what to say about twenty years? And how can you know the other, the woman who is far away from you? You cannot enter into her dreams, you cannot enter into her thoughts, you cannot enter into her desires how can you know her being? Even dreams you cannot know. You may be sleeping with the same woman for twenty years in the same bed, but she dreams her dreams, you dream your dreams; your subjectivities remain worlds apart. Even while you are making love to a woman and holding her in your hands, are you really holding the woman who is there or are you holding just an imagination, a projection, a shadow? Are you really holding the real woman in your hands, or just a mind image, a ghost? Do you love this woman who is there, or do you have certain ideas that you love and you find those ideas reflected in this woman? When there are two persons in a bed, my feeling is that there are always four persons: two ghosts lying just in between the two the woman’s projection of the husband and the husband’s projection of the wife.
It is not accidental that the husband goes on trying to change the wife according to some ideal, and the wife goes on changing trying, at least, to change the husband according to some ideal. Those are the two ghosts. You can’t accept the woman as she is, can you? You have many improvements to make, many changes. And if it were really possible...if one day God comes to the world and says, ”Okay. Now all wives are allowed to change their husbands as they want,” or, ”All husbands are allowed to change their wives as they want,” what will happen, do you know? The world will simply go crazy. If women are allowed to change their husbands, you will not find a single man left that you can recognize. All old people will be gone. If husbands are allowed to change their wives, then no single woman here will be left as she was. And do you think you will be happy? You will not be, because then the woman that you have changed and made according to your ideas will not appeal to you; she will not have a mystery in her.
Look at the absurdities of the mind, the demands of the mind suicidal demands. If you are able to change your husband and you really become powerful enough to change him totally, will you love that man? He will be just something put together by you. He will not have any mystery, he will not have any soul, he will not have any integrity of his own, and he will not have anything to be explored by you. You will lose interest, you will be bored by him; it will be just ’homemade’. What interest? Interest arises only because there is something unknown to be explored, a mystery, an invocation challenging you to move into the unfamiliar.

The first thing: you have not known yourself, how can you know your wife? not possible. Start by knowing yourself. And this is the beauty of it: the day you know yourself, you will know all. Not only your wife, you will know the whole existence; not only man, but trees and birds and animals, and the rocks and the rivers and the mountains. You will know all because you contain all; you are a miniature universe. And another beauty, another incredible experience, is that the moment you know yourself, the mystery is not finished. In fact for the first time, the mystery becomes tremendous. You know, and yet you know that much is there to be known. You know, and yet you know that this knowledge is nothing. You know, and yet the boundary is far away. You only enter into the ocean of knowledge, you never reach the other shore. That moment the whole existence is mysterious: your wife, your child, your friend. And that knowledge is not destructive of the magic, of the poetry of life; that knowledge enhances the poetry, the magic, the miracle, the mystery.
”I have been married for twenty years already, and that ’Why can’t she understand?’ feeling is there.” Do you understand yourself? Have you not been doing things for which you repent later on? and you say, ”I have done it in spite of myself.” Do you understand yourself? Do you do things through understanding? When somebody hits you and you become angry, are you becoming angry with understanding? or just because he has pushed your button?
Your knowledge about yourself is so superficial...it is just like a driver, a driver driving a car. Yes, a few things he knows: he can manage the steering wheel, he can manage the accelerator, he can manage the clutch, he can manage the gearbox, he can manage the brake that’s all. Do you think he knows everything about the car? What is hidden under the bonnet is not known at all, and that is the real car; that is where the action is, that is where the real thing is happening. And what he is pushing and pulling are nothing but buttons. Sooner or later these things are going to disappear from cars. They should disappear, they are very primitive this steering wheel, this accelerator, this brake. They should disappear, they are not needed; a computer can do all that. And then even a small child can drive the car there is no need for a license really. Osho, I have been married for twenty years already and that ”Why can’t she understand?” feeling is there. And then I have never seen her in my life, and then I am in the middle of a honeymoon, and then.... My mind goes bananas! Mind always goes bananas that is the way of the mind.The mind is a flux, it continuously changes; it is not the same for any two consecutive moments, each moment it is different. Yes, one moment you feel that you have not seen your wife in your whole life, you have not met her yet, although you have been living with her for twenty years. Another moment you see yourself just in the middle of a honeymoon you have seen her beauty, her grace, her joy, her innermost core and then it is gone. And the scene goes on changing. The mind is very slippery. It goes on slipping, it cannot stay anywhere. It has no capacity to stand; it is a flux. With the mind everything is like that: one moment you are happy, another moment you are unhappy; one moment you are so joyful, another moment you are so sad...it goes on and on, the wheel of the mind goes on moving. One moment one spoke is on top, another moment another spoke has come to the top, and it goes on this way. That’s why in the East we call it samsara, the wheel. The world is a wheel, it goes on moving the same wheel, again and again and again, and it is not stable for a single moment. It is like a movie: if the movie stops for a single moment you will be able to see the screen. But the movie goes on moving and it is moving so fast and you are so engrossed in it, so occupied with it, that you cannot see the screen. And the screen is the reality. The pictures projected upon it are just dreams. Mind goes on projecting. I have heard....
A millionaire entered a post office and saw an elderly couple standing at the counter drawing their old-age pensions. He was in a good mood; he felt very sorry for the old couple and he thought they should be given one week’s holiday to know the beauties and the joys of life...he was in a charitable mood. Going up to them he said, ”How would you like to spend a week at my residence? I will give you both a wonderful time.” Well, the old couple agreed, and so the millionaire took them off to his house in his Rolls and, as he had promised, saw that they had a really good holiday with excellent food, color television and many luxuries which they never dreamed they would ever have. At the end of the week he walked into the library where the old boy was enjoying a quiet time with a glass of wine and smoking a cigar. ”Well,” he said, ”have you enjoyed yourself?” ”Indeed I have,” the old boy replied. ”But can I ask you a question?” ”Certainly,” replied the millionaire.
”Then” said the other, ”who’s the old woman I have been sleeping with all week?” This will be the situation of people who have lived with their wife, with their husband, their whole lives. Who is the woman you have been sleeping with for twenty years? There are moments when you feel you know. There are moments when suddenly there is a China Wall, opaque, dark you cannot see anything, you don’t know who this stranger here is.
All our knowing is so superficial; we remain strangers. You can sleep with the woman for twenty years that doesn’t make much difference, you remain strangers. And the reason is that you don’t even know yourself, how can you know the other? It is impossible, you are hoping for the impossible. You don’t even know yourself! You don’t know the man you are and you have been here in existence for eternity. Millions of lives you have been here and you don’t know yet who you are, so what to say about twenty years? And how can you know the other, the woman who is far away from you? You cannot enter into her dreams, you cannot enter into her thoughts, you cannot enter into her desires how can you know her being? Even dreams you cannot know. You may be sleeping with the same woman for twenty years in the same bed, but she dreams her dreams, you dream your dreams; your subjectivities remain worlds apart. Even while you are making love to a woman and holding her in your hands, are you really holding the woman who is there or are you holding just an imagination, a projection, a shadow? Are you really holding the real woman in your hands, or just a mind image, a ghost? Do you love this woman who is there, or do you have certain ideas that you love and you find those ideas reflected in this woman? When there are two persons in a bed, my feeling is that there are always four persons: two ghosts lying just in between the two the woman’s projection of the husband and the husband’s projection of the wife.
It is not accidental that the husband goes on trying to change the wife according to some ideal, and the wife goes on changing trying, at least, to change the husband according to some ideal. Those are the two ghosts. You can’t accept the woman as she is, can you? You have many improvements to make, many changes. And if it were really possible...if one day God comes to the world and says, ”Okay. Now all wives are allowed to change their husbands as they want,” or, ”All husbands are allowed to change their wives as they want,” what will happen, do you know? The world will simply go crazy. If women are allowed to change their husbands, you will not find a single man left that you can recognize. All old people will be gone. If husbands are allowed to change their wives, then no single woman here will be left as she was. And do you think you will be happy? You will not be, because then the woman that you have changed and made according to your ideas will not appeal to you; she will not have a mystery in her.
Look at the absurdities of the mind, the demands of the mind suicidal demands. If you are able to change your husband and you really become powerful enough to change him totally, will you love that man? He will be just something put together by you. He will not have any mystery, he will not have any soul, he will not have any integrity of his own, and he will not have anything to be explored by you. You will lose interest, you will be bored by him; it will be just ’homemade’. What interest? Interest arises only because there is something unknown to be explored, a mystery, an invocation challenging you to move into the unfamiliar. The first thing: you have not known yourself, how can you know your wife? not possible. Start by knowing yourself. And this is the beauty of it: the day you know yourself, you will know all. Not only your wife, you will know the whole existence; not only man, but trees and birds and animals, and the rocks and the rivers and the mountains. You will know all because you contain all; you are a miniature universe. And another beauty, another incredible experience, is that the moment you know yourself, the mystery is not finished. In fact for the first time, the mystery becomes tremendous. You know, and yet you know that much is there to be known. You know, and yet you know that this knowledge is nothing. You know, and yet the boundary is far away. You only enter into the ocean of knowledge, you never reach the other shore. That moment the whole existence is mysterious: your wife, your child, your friend. And that knowledge is not destructive of the magic, of the poetry of life; that knowledge enhances the poetry, the magic, the miracle, the mystery.
”I have been married for twenty years already, and that ’Why can’t she understand?’ feeling is there.” Do you understand yourself? Have you not been doing things for which you repent later on? and you say, ”I have done it in spite of myself.” Do you understand yourself? Do you do things through understanding? When somebody hits you and you become angry, are you becoming angry with understanding? or just because he has pushed your button?
Your knowledge about yourself is so superficial...it is just like a driver, a driver driving a car. Yes, a few things he knows: he can manage the steering wheel, he can manage the accelerator, he can manage the clutch, he can manage the gearbox, he can manage the brake that’s all. Do you think he knows everything about the car? What is hidden under the bonnet is not known at all, and that is the real car; that is where the action is, that is where the real thing is happening. And what he is pushing and pulling are nothing but buttons. Sooner or later these things are going to disappear from cars. They should disappear, they are very primitive this steering wheel, this accelerator, this brake. They should disappear, they are not needed; a computer can do all that. And then even a small child can drive the car there is no need for a license really. But do you understand what is happening inside? When you push a button and the electric light comes on, do you understand electricity? You simply know how to push the button, that’s all that you know.
I have heard a story....
When for the first time electricity came to Vienna, a friend of Sigmund Freud came to visit him. He had never seen electricity. At night Freud left him in his room to rest. The friend was very worried: he had never seen electricity and he could not find how to put the light off. He tried hard he stood on the bed, he tried to blow out the light, but he could not find any way to blow it out. And he was afraid to go back and ask Freud because that would be too foolish. ”What will these people think...you cannot even blow out a light? You don’t know even that much?” That would look too ignorant. And he was from a small village so they would laugh, and that would not be good. So he covered the lamp with a towel and went to sleep. He couldn’t sleep well; again and again he thought about it: there must be some way.... He got up; again and again he tried... and there was the light and it was difficult to sleep. And more than the light was this pricking, a continuous pricking, that ”I don’t know even such a small thing?” In the morning, when Freud asked him, ”Did you sleep well?” the friend replied, ”Everything was good. Just one thing I have to ask: how to put this light off?”
And Freud said, ”You don’t know electricity at all it seems. Come here. Just on the wall is the switch; you push the switch and the light is off.”
Then the villager said, ”So simple! Now I know what electricity is.” But do you know what electricity is? Do you know what anger is? Do you know what love is? Do you know what happiness, joy is? Do you know what sadness is? Nothing is known. You don’t know yourself. You don’t know your mind. You don’t know your inner being. You don’t know how this whole life happens. From where? From where comes anger? From where comes joy? From where...? One moment you feel so celebrating and the next moment you are ready to commit suicide.
”’Why can’t she understand?’ that feeling....”
About your wife it is natural. How can you understand her? You have not even understood your mind. The day you understand your mind and your being you have understood all minds and all beings, because the fundamental law is the same. If you can understand a single drop of sea water, you have understood all the seas past, present, future of this earth, of other planets, because once you have understood that it is H2O, you have understood water. Wherever water exists, it will be H2O. Once you have understood your anger, you have understood all the angers of all the human beings ever, past, present, future. If you have understood your sexuality, you have understood all sex.
Please don’t try to understand the other, that is not the way. Try to understand yourself, that is the way. You are a miniature universe. In you is the whole map of existence.
Question 4
The fourth question:
Osho, I love my husband but I hate sex, and that creates conflict. Isn’t sex animalistic? It is. But man is an animal as much of an animal as any other animal. But when I say that man is an animal, I don’t mean that man finishes with animality; he can be more than the animal, he can be less also. That is the glory of man, the freedom and the danger, the agony and the ecstasy. A man can be far lower than animals, and a man can be far higher than gods. Man has infinite potentiality. A dog is a dog: he remains a dog. He is born a dog and he will die a dog. A man can become a buddha, and a man can become an Adolf Hitler too. So man is very open-ended on both sides he can fall back. Can you find any animal more dangerous than man, more mad than man?
Just think of a scene: fifty thousand monkeys sitting in a stadium, killing small children, throwing them into a fire. What will you think about them? Thousands of children are being thrown into a fire.... A great fire is burning just in the middle of the stadium, and fifty thousand monkeys enjoying with joy, dancing, and children are being thrown their own children. What will you think about these monkeys? Will you not think that the monkeys have gone mad? But this has happened in humanity. In Carthage it happened: fifty thousand men burning children. They burned three hundred children at one time as an offering to their god their own children! But forget about Carthage, it is long past. What did Adolf Hitler do in this century? Of course, this is a far-advanced century, so Adolf Hitler was capable of doing greater things than were done in Carthage. He killed millions of Jews; thousands at a time would be forced into a chamber and gassed. And hundreds of people would be looking from the outside, watching through one-way mirrors. What will you think about these people? What type of men...? People being gassed, burned, evaporated, and others are watching? Can you think about animals doing such a thing?
During three thousand years man has been through five thousand wars killing and killing and killing. And you call sex animalistic? Animals have never done anything more ’animalistic’ than man. And you think man is not an animal?
Man is an animal. And the idea that man is not an animal is one of the hindrances for your growth. So you take it for granted that you are not animals, and then you stop growing. The first recognition has to be this, that ”I am an animal and I have to be alert and and go beyond it.”
It happened.... A man wrote to a country hotel in Ireland to ask if his dog would be allowed to stay there. He received the following answer:
Dear Sir,
I have been in the hotel business for over thirty years. Never yet have I had to call in the police to eject a disorderly dog in the small hours of the morning. No dog has ever attempted to pass off a bad cheque on me. Never has a dog set the bedclothes alight through smoking. I have never found a hotel towel in a dog’s suitcase. Your dog is welcome.
P.S. If he can vouch for you, you can come too!
Animals are beautiful, whatsoever they are; they are just innocent. Man is very cunning, very calculating, very ugly. Man can fall lower than the animals, because man can rise higher than man, higher than gods. Man has an infinite potentiality: he can be the lowest and he can be the highest. He has the whole ladder in his being, from the first rung to the last rung.
So the first thing I would like to say to you: Don’t call sex just animalistic, because sex can be just animalistic that is possible but it need not be. It can rise higher: it can become love, it can become prayer. It depends on you. Sex in itself is nothing like a fixed entity; it is just a possibility. You can make it as you like it, as you want it.
That is the whole message of Tantra: sex can become samadhi. That is the vision of Tantra: sex can become samadhi, through sex the ultimate ecstasy can enter in you.
Sex can become the bridge between you and the ultimate.
You say: ”I love my husband but I hate sex, and that creates conflict.” How can you love your husband and yet hate sex? You must be playing on words. How can you love your husband and hate sex?
Just try to understand it. When you love a man you would like to hold his hand too. When you love a man you would like to hug him sometimes too. When you love a man you would not only like to hear his sound, you would like to see his face too. When you hear only the sound of your beloved, the beloved is far away, the sound is not enough; when you see him too you are more satisfied. When you touch him, certainly you are even more satisfied. When you taste him, certainly you are even more satisfied. What is sex? It is just a meeting of two deep energies.
You must be carrying some taboos in your mind, inhibitions. What is sex? Just two persons meeting at the maximum point not only holding hands, not only hugging each other’s bodies, but penetrating into each other’s energy realm. Why should you hate sex? Your mind must have been conditioned by the mahatmas, the so-called religious people who have poisoned the whole of humanity, who have poisoned your very source of growth. Why should you hate? If you love your man you would like to share your total being with him; there is no need to hate. And if you hate sex, what are you saying? You are simply saying that you want the man to take care of you financially, to take care of the house, to bring you a car and a fur coat. You want to use the man...and you call it love? And you don’t want to share anything with him.
When you love, you share all. When you love, you don’t have any secrets. When you love, you have your heart utterly open, you are available. When you love, you are ready to go with him even to hell if he is going to hell. But this happens. We are very expert with words: we don’t want to say that we don’t love, so we make it look as if we love and we hate sex. Sex is not all love, that’s true; love is more than sex, that’s true but sex is the very foundation of it. Yes, one day sex disappears, but to hate it is not the way to make it disappear. To hate it is the way to repress it, and whatsoever is repressed will come up one way or other. Please don’t try to become a monk or a nun.
Listen to this story.
The nuns ran an orphanage, and one day the Mother Superior summoned to her office three buxom girls who were leaving and said, ”Now you are all going out into the big sinful world and I must warn you against certain 130
men. There are men who will buy you drinks, take you to a room, undress you and do unspeakable things to you. Then they give you two or three pounds, and you’re sent away, ruined!” ”Excuse me, Reverend Mother,” said the boldest one, ”did you say these wicked men do this to us and give us three pounds too?”
”Yes, dear child. Why do you ask?”
”Well, the priests only give us apples.” Remember, sex is natural. One can go beyond it, but not through repression. And if you repress it, sooner or later you will find some other way to express it, some perversion is bound to enter; you will have to find some substitute. And substitutes are of no help at all; they don’t help, they can’t help. And once a natural problem has been turned in such a way that you have forgotten about it, and it has bubbled up somewhere else as a substitute, you can go on fighting with the substitute, but it is not going to help.
I have heard....
A stranger got into a suburban railway carriage in which two men were already sitting. One of them had a peculiar mannerism he scratched his elbow again and again and again. This elbow-scratching was nearly driving the stranger mad by the time the victim got out at his station.
”Gravely afflicted, your friend,” he said to the other man.
”Yes indeed; he has got a terrible dose of piles.”
”I’m not talking about piles, I’m talking about all that scratching just now.” ”Yes, that is right, piles. You see, he is a very religious man and a civil servant too, and that scratching of the elbow is just a substitute.”
But substitutes never help; they only create perversions, obsessions. Be natural if you want to go beyond nature someday. Be natural, that is the first requirement. I am not saying that there is nothing more than nature; there is a higher nature that is the whole message of Tantra. But be very earthly if you really want to rise high in the sky.
Can’t you see these trees? They are rooted in the earth, and the better they are rooted the higher they go. The higher they want to go, the deeper they will have to go into the earth. If a tree wants to touch the stars, the tree will have to go and touch the very hell that’s the only way.
Be rooted in your body if you want to become a soul. Be rooted in your sex if you really want to become a lover. Yes, the more energy is converted into love, the less and less need of sex will be there, but you will not hate it.
Hate is not a right relationship with anything. Hate simply shows that you are afraid, hate simply shows that there is great fear in you. Hate simply shows that deep down you are still attracted. If you hate sex, then your energy will start moving somewhere else. Energy has to move.
Man, if he suppresses sex, becomes more ambitious. If you really want to be ambitious you have to suppress your sex; then only can ambition have energy, otherwise you will not have any energy. A politician has to suppress sex; then only can he rush towards New Delhi. Sex energy is needed, repressed sex energy is needed, and great anger is needed. Whenever you are suppressing sex, you are angry at the whole world; you can become a great revolutionary. All revolutionaries are bound to be sexually repressed. When in a better world sex will be simple, natural, accepted without any taboo and without any inhibition, politics will disappear and there will be no revolutionaries. There will be no need. When a man represses sex he becomes too attached to money; he has to put his sexual energy somewhere. Have you not seen people holding their hundred-rupee notes as if they were touching their beloved? Can’t you see in their eyes the same lust? But this is ugly. To hold a woman with deep love is beautiful; to hold a hundred-rupee note with lust is just ugly. It is a substitute.
You cannot deceive animals.
A man went to the zoo and took his son; he wanted to show his son the monkeys there. The son was very interested, he had never seen monkeys. They went there but no monkeys. So he asked the zoo-keeper, ”What has happened? Where are the monkeys?”
And the zoo-keeper said, ”This is their love season, so they have gone into the hut.” The man was very frustrated. For months he had been trying to bring the boy, they had traveled far and now this was love season! So he asked, ”If we throw nuts, won’t they come out?” And the zoo-keeper said, ”Would you?”
But I think man can come out, if we throw nuts. Man has come out. The zoo-keeper is wrong. The monkeys will not come, that is certain. If you give them money they will not come, they will say, ”Keep your money, the
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love season is on! Keep your money.” And if you say, ”We can make you president of India,” they will say, ”You keep your presidency, the love season is on!”
But man, if you make him a president, can kill his beloved; if that is the stake, he can do that. These are substitutes. You cannot befool animals. I have heard....
The spinster had a parrot who kept repeating, ”I want to poke! I want to poke!” She found this slightly irritating until a married friend explained what it meant. Then she became very alarmed. ”I love that bird, but I’ll have to get rid of him or the vicar will never call again,” she said.
But her more experienced friend said, ”Well, if you really love him, you’ll get him what he longs for, which is a female; then he won’t keep on about it all the time.”
Off went the spinster to the bird shop, but the man said, ”No, I can’t do anything right now. No lady parrots coming in all season, Miss. But I can do you a lady owl at a reasonable price.” Anything was better than nothing, so she popped the owl into the parrot’s cage and waited with thrilled anticipation.
”I want to poke! I want to poke!” said the parrot.
”Ooo-Ooo!” said the lady owl.
”Not you, you goggle-eyed freak!” said the parrot. ”I can’t stand women who wear glasses!” Substitutes won’t do. Man is living with substitutes. Sex is natural, money is unnatural. Sex is natural; power, prestige, respectability, are unnatural. If you really want to hate something, hate money, hate power, hate prestige. Why hate love?
Sex is one of the most beautiful phenomena in the world. Of course, the lowest, that is true, but the higher moves through the lower: the lotus comes out of the mud. Don’t hate the mud; otherwise how will you help the mud to release the lotus? Help the mud, take care of the mud so that the lotus is released. Certainly the lotus is so far away from the mud that you cannot even conceive of any relationship. If you see a lotus you cannot believe that it comes out of dirty mud but it comes; it is the expression of the dirty mud. The soul is released from the body, love is released from sex. Sex is a body thing, love is a spiritual thing. Sex is like mud, love is like a lotus. But without the mud the lotus is not possible. So don’t hate the mud. The whole Tantra message is simple; it is very scientific and it is very natural. The message is that if you really want to go beyond the world, go into the world deeply, fully alert, aware.

Question 5

And the last question:

Osho, I have many questions, but each time a voice inside me says, ”Don’t ask find out for yourself.” But now it is too much, because I don’t know where this voice is coming from. The question is from Dharma Chetana.Can’t you recognize my voice?
Enough for today.
Tantric Transformation
Chapter 3 Breaking the four Seals
Audio:Yes Video:No Length:99 mins As higher awareness, they teach what they experience within. What fetters them they will call liberation. A glass trinket colored green, to them is a priceless emerald. Deluded, they know not a gem from what they think it should be.
They take copper to be gold. Bound by discursive thought, they think these thoughts to be ultimate reality. They long for the pleasures experienced in dreams. They call the perishable body-mind eternal bliss supreme. By the symbol EVAM they think self-clearness is achieved. By the different situations that demand four seals they call what they have fancied spontaneity. But this is looking at reflections in a mirror. As under delusion’s power a herd of deer will rush for the water in a mirage which is not recognized, so also the deluded quench not their thirst, are bound by chains and find pleasure in them, saying that all is ultimately real. Tantra is transcendence. It is neither indulgence nor repression. It is walking on a tightrope, it is one of the greatest of balances. It is not as easy as it appears, it needs very delicate awareness. It is a great harmony. It is very easy for the mind to indulge. The opposite is also very easy: to renounce. To move to the extreme is very easy for the mind. To remain in the middle, exactly in the middle, is the most difficult thing for the mind, because it is a suicide for the mind. The mind dies in the middle and the no-mind arises. That’s why Buddha has called his path majjhim nikaya the middle path. Saraha is a disciple of Buddha, in the same lineage, with the same understanding, with the same awareness.
So this very fundamental thing has to be understood, otherwise you will misunderstand Tantra. What is this razor’s edge? What is this being exactly in the middle? To indulge in the world, no awareness is needed. To repress worldly desires, again no awareness is needed. Your so-called worldly people and your so-called otherworldly people are not very different; they may be standing back-to-back but they are not very different at all, they are of exactly the same type of mind. Somebody is hankering for money, and somebody is so against money that he cannot even see currency notes; he becomes afraid and a trembling arises in him. These people are not different; for both of them money is of great importance. One is in greed, one is in fear, but the importance of the money is the same: both are obsessed with money.
One is continuously thinking of women, dreaming, fantasizing. Another has become so afraid that he has escaped to the Himalayas just to avoid women. But both are the same: for both, the woman is important, or the man the other is important. One seeks the other, one avoids the other, but the other remains their focus. Tantra says: The other has not to be the focus, neither this way nor that way. This can happen only through great understanding. The lust for a woman has to be understood neither indulged in nor avoided, but understood. Tantra is very scientific.
The word science means understanding, the word science means knowing. Tantra says: Knowing liberates. If you know exactly what greed is, you are free of greed; there is no need to renounce it. The need to renounce arises only because you have not understood what greed is. The need to take a vow against sex is needed only because you have not understood what sex is. And the society does not allow you to understand it. The society helps you not to understand. The society has been avoiding the very subject of sex and death down through the centuries. These subjects are not to be thought about, not to be contemplated, not to be discussed, not to be written about, not to be researched; they are to be avoided. Through that avoidance a great ignorance has existed about them and that ignorance is the root cause. Then there are two types of people who come out of that ignorance: one who indulges madly, and one who becomes very tired and escapes. Tantra says: The one who is indulging madly will never understand because he will simply be repeating a habit, and he will never look into the habit and the root cause of it; he will never look into the causality of it. And the more he indulges the more mechanical he becomes.
Have you not observed it? Your first love had something superb, the second was not so superb, the third was even more ordinary, the fourth just mundane. What happened? Why has the first love been so praised? Why have people always said that love happens only once? Why? ...Because the first time it was not mechanical, so you were a little alert about it. The next time you were expecting it, you were not so alert. The third time you thought you knew about it so there was no exploration in it. The fourth time it was just mundane; you have settled into a mechanical habit.
Through indulgence sex becomes a habit. Yes, it gives a little release just like a sneeze, but not more than that. It is a physical release of energy. You become too burdened with energy, you have to throw that energy. Just to gather it again through food, through exercise, through sunlight again gather it and again throw it that’s what the person who indulges goes on doing. He creates great energy and then throws it, for no purpose, for no significance. Having it, he suffers the tension of it. Throwing it, he suffers the weakness of it. He simply suffers. Never think that the man who indulges is a happy man never! He is the most miserable man in the world. How can he be happy? He hopes, he desires happiness, but he never achieves it. But remember, saying these things Tantra does not propose that you move to the other extreme. Tantra is not saying that you should escape from this world of indulgence. Escaping will again become a mechanical habit. Sitting in a cave, the woman will not be available, but that doesn’t make much difference. If any time the woman does become available the man who has renounced will be more prone to fall than the man who was indulging in the world. Whatsoever you repress becomes very powerful within you.
I have heard....
There was a fireman who was horridly mean both to his wife and his lodger. One night he brought home a splendid pork pie and ate half of it for his supper. His wife and the lodger had to make do with dry bread and cheese. He carefully put the rest of the pie away and they all went to their beds. In the middle of the night the firebells rang and off the landlord had to run. The wife, stark naked, entered the lodger’s room, shook him awake and said, ”He has gone out. Quick! Now is your chance.” ”Are you sure it’s all right?” inquired the lodger.
”Of course! Hurry up, lose no time!”
So the lodger went downstairs and finished the pork pie.
Now that must have been his repression the pork pie. He must have been dreaming about it, thinking about it, fantasizing about it. The stark naked woman had no attraction for him, but the pork pie.... Remember, whatsoever you repress will become your attraction, will have a magnetic pull on you. The repressed becomes powerful; it gains power out of all proportion.
Listen to this anecdote....
Deep in a beautiful woodland park stood two lovely bronze statues, a boy and a girl posed in attitudes of love and longing. They had stood thus for three hundred years, their arms held out yearningly to each other yet never touching. One day a magician passed by and with compassion said, ”I have enough power to give them life for one hour, so I am going to do this. For one hour they will be able to kiss, to touch, to embrace, to make love to each other.”
So the magician waved his magic wand, and immediately the statues leaped off their pedestals and hand in hand ran into the shrubbery.
There was a great commotion...loud thumps, shouts, squawkings and flutterings. With irresistible curiosity the magician tiptoed over and peered into the leaves. The boy was holding down a bird, over which the girl squatted. Suddenly he jumped up and exclaimed, ”Now it is your turn to hold him down while I shit upon him!” Three hundred years of birds shitting upon them...then who bothers about lovemaking? That was their repression. You can go and sit in a cave and become a statue, but that which you have repressed will hover around you, will be the only thing that you will ever think about.
Tantra says: Beware...beware of indulgence and beware of renunciation. Beware of both, both are traps. And either way you are trapped in the mind.
Then where is the way? Tantra says: Awareness is the way. Indulgence is mechanical, repression is mechanical, both are mechanical things. The only way out of mechanical things is to become aware, alert. Don’t go to the Himalayas, bring a Himalayan silence within you. Don’t escape, become more awake. Look into things deeply with no fear...without fear look into things deeply. Don’t listen to what your so-called religious people go on teaching. They make you afraid, they don’t allow you to look into sex, they don’t allow you to look into death. They have exploited your fears tremendously.
The only way to exploit a person is first to make him afraid. Once you are afraid you are ready to be exploited. Fear is the basis, it has to be created first. You have been made afraid: sex is sin. So there is fear.... Even while making love to your woman or man you never look directly into it, even while making love you are avoiding. You are making love and avoiding. You don’t want to see into the reality of it what it is exactly, why it infatuates, why it has a magnetic pull over you why? What is it exactly, how does it arise, how does it take possession of you, what does it give and where does it lead? What happens in it and what happens out of it? Where do you arrive again and again making love? Do you arrive anywhere? These things have to be encountered. Tantra is an encounter with the reality of life. And sex is fundamental, so is death. They are the two most basic, fundamental chakras muladhar and swadhishthan. Understanding them, the third chakra opens. Understanding the third, the fourth opens, and so on and so forth. When you have understood the six chakras, that very understanding hits the seventh chakra and it blooms into a one-thousand-petaled lotus. That day is of superb glory. That day God comes to you, that day you come to God; that day is the meeting day. That day is the day of cosmic orgasm. That day you embrace the divine and the divine embraces you. That day the river disappears into the ocean forever and forever; then there is no coming back.
But from each state of your mind understanding has to be gained. Wherever you are, don’t be afraid. That is the Tantra message: wherever you are, don’t be afraid. Drop only one thing fear. Only one thing has to be feared and that is fear. Unafraid, with great courage, look into the reality, whatsoever the reality is. If you are a thief, then look into that. If you are an angry person, look into that. If you are greedy, look into that. Wherever you are, look into it. Don’t escape. Looking into it, go through it. Watching, go through it. If you can walk the path into greed, into sex, into anger, into jealousy, with eyes open, you will be freed of it. This is the Tantra promise: Truth liberates. Knowing frees. Knowing is freedom. Otherwise, whether you repress or you indulge, the end is the same.
It happened....
There was a man who had a most attractive wife. But he began to be suspicious of her...it is natural. The more beautiful wife you have, the more the suspicion.
Mulla Nasruddin has married one of the ugliest of women. I asked, ”Why, Mulla? What went wrong? What took possession of you?”
He said, ”Nothing, just understanding.” I said, ”What type of understanding is this?” He said, ”Now I will never be jealous and I will never suspect my wife, because I can’t imagine any person being in love with her.”
This man was very suspicious of her. At last he could stand it no longer. Being on nights he asked the foreman for a pass out, and went home at two in the morning to find his best friend’s car outside, just as he had feared. He let himself in, crept up the stairs and rushed into his wife’s bedroom. There she lay on top of the bed stark naked, but smoking a cigarette and reading a book.
He went wild and searched under the bed, in the wardrobe, even in the airing cupboard, but he could not find any man. He went berserk and wrecked the bedroom. Then he started on the living room threw the TV out of the window, slashed the armchairs, overturned the table and sideboard. Then he turned his attention to the kitchen, where he smashed all the crockery and then threw the fridge out of the window. Then he shot himself. When he got up to heaven’s gates who should he see waiting for admission but his late best friend, who said, ”What are you doing up here?”
So the wronged husband explained all about how he had lost his temper and all about it, and then added, ”But how does it come about that you are up here too?”
”Ah, me? I was in the fridge.”
Both end the same way whether you are in the Himalayan cave or in the world does not make much difference. The life of indulgence and the life of repression both end in the same way because their mechanism is not different. Their appearance is different, but their inner quality is the same.
Awareness brings a different quality to your life. With awareness things start changing, changing tremendously. Not that you change them, no, not at all. A man of awareness does not change anything and a man of unawareness continuously tries to change everything. But the man of unawareness never succeeds in changing anything, and the man of awareness simply finds change happening, tremendous change happening. It is awareness that brings change, not your effort. Why does it happen through awareness? because the awareness changes you. And when you are different the whole world is different. It is not a question of creating a different world, it is only a question of creating a different you. You are your world, so if you change the world changes. If you don’t change, you can go on changing the whole world nothing changes; you will go on creating the same world again and again. You create your world. It is out of you that your world is projected. Tantra says: Awareness is the key, the master key which opens all the doors of life. So remember, it is really delicate.... If I talk about the foolishness of repression, you start thinking about indulging; if I talk about the foolishness of indulgence, you start thinking about repression. It happens every day: you move to the opposite immediately. And the whole point is not to be tempted by the opposite. To be tempted by the opposite is to be tempted by the devil. That is the devil in the Tantra system, to be tempted by the opposite. There is no other devil; the only devil is that the mind can play a trick upon you, it can propose the opposite. You are against indulgence? The mind says, ”So simple...now repress. Don’t indulge, escape. Drop this whole world. Forget all about it.” But how can you forget all about it? Is it so simple to forget all about it? Then why are you escaping far away? Then why are you afraid? If you can forget all about it so simply, then be here and forget all about it. But you can’t be here, you know the world will tempt you. And this momentary understanding, this false understanding that you think you have got, will not be of much use. When the temptation comes from desires you will be a victim; you know it. Before it happens you want to escape, you want to escape fast. You want to escape from the opportunity. Why? Why do you want to escape from the opportunity? In India the so-called saints won’t stay with householders. Why? What is the fear? In India the so-called saints won’t touch a woman, won’t even look. Why? What is the fear? From where does this fear come? Just avoiding the opportunity.... But to avoid the opportunity is not a great achievement. And by avoiding the opportunity, if you attain to a certain celibacy that celibacy is just false.
I have heard....
A countryman went into a London pub with a dog. The man ordered a pint, the dog ordered a whisky. ”What the hell...?” said the barman.
”Yes,” said the owner, ”he is the most intelligent dog in the West Country. I brought him to see the sights of the town.”
”If I give him five pence will he get me a paper?” said the barman ”because I forgot to get one.” ”Of course I will,” piped the dog. Then, receiving the money, ”Back soon...ta, ta.” The dog did not return, so after an hour the worried owner went in search. He finally found his dog in a back alley nicely on the job with a bitch.
”Well I’m damned!” said the owner. ”You have never done that before.” ”No,” said the dog, ”I have never had the money before.”
Just avoiding the opportunity is not of much use, it is just a false faade; you can believe in it but you cannot deceive God. In fact you cannot even deceive yourself. Continuously in your dream, that which you have left behind in a repressive way will be popping up again and again. It will drive you crazy. Your so-called saints are not even able to sleep well, they are afraid of sleep. Why? because in sleep, the world that they have repressed asserts itself in dreams. The unconscious starts relating, the unconscious says, ”What are you doing here? You are a fool.” The unconscious spreads its net again.
While you are awake you can repress, but when you are asleep how can you repress? You lose all control. The conscious represses, but the conscious goes to sleep. That’s why in all the old traditions saints have always been afraid of sleep. They cut down their sleep from eight hours to seven, from seven to six, from six to five...four, three, two. And foolish people think it a great achievement. They think, ”This saint is a great saint, he sleeps only two hours.” In fact he is simply showing one thing that he is afraid of his unconscious. He does not allow the unconscious time to relate.
When you sleep for only two hours the unconscious cannot relate, because those two hours are needed for the body’s rest. You dream better dreams, good dreams, beautiful dreams by the time your sleep is complete that’s why you dream better in the morning, in the early morning. First the body need has to be finished, the body needs rest. Once the body has rested, then the mind needs rest; that is a secondary thing. One thing is that when the mind needs rest, then the unconscious, in a restful mood, releases its desires and dreams arise. The second thing is that if you only rest for two hours in the night, there may be dreams but you will not be able to remember them. That’s why you remember only the late dreams that you dream early in the morning. You forget the other dreams of the whole night because you are so deeply in sleep that you cannot remember. So the saint thinks he has not dreamed about sex, he has not dreamed about money, he has not dreamed about power, prestige, respectability. If he sleeps for two hours, the sleep is so deep, it is such a necessity for the body, that it is almost like a coma, so he cannot remember. You remember dreams only when you are half awake and half asleep. Then the dream can be remembered, because it is close to the conscious; half asleep, half awake, something of the dream filters into your conscious, moves into the conscious. In the morning you can remember a little bit of it. That’s why you will be surprised that if you go and ask a laborer who works hard the whole day, ”Do you dream?” he will say, ”No.”
Primitive people don’t dream. It is not true that they don’t dream they can’t remember, that’s all. All dream, but they can’t remember. Working hard the whole day chopping wood or digging a ditch or breaking stones is such hard work, eight hours, that when you fall asleep you are almost in a coma. Dreams come but you cannot remember, you cannot recapture them.
Now your so-called saints have always been afraid of sleep.... Once a young man was brought to me. He was going crazy. He was a follower of Swami Sivananda of Rishikesh. I asked him, ”What is the matter with you?” He said, ”Nothing is the matter. I am a spiritual man. People think I am going crazy.” I inquired of his parents they were very worried; I went into the details. The details were this: he went to Swami Sivananda and Sivananda said, ”You sleep too much. This is not good for spiritual health, you should sleep less.” So he cut his sleep to three hours from eight hours to three! Now he started feeling sleepy the whole day, naturally. So Sivananda said, ”You are tamasic, you have very low, bad energy in you. Change your food. You must be taking food which makes you heavy and sleepy.” So he started living just on milk. Now he started becoming weak. First sleep was cut, then food was cut; now he was in such a state that at any time he could topple over.
Without food it becomes more difficult for you to go into deep sleep even for three hours; food is a must for a good sleep. When the stomach has nothing to digest, the whole energy moves into the head. That’s why on a fasting day you cannot sleep well. The energy is not in the stomach, it is released into the head. When the energy is needed in the stomach, the head cannot get it because the head is secondary, the stomach is primary. There is a certain hierarchy in the body...first things first. The stomach is basic. The stomach can exist without the head, but the head cannot exist without the stomach. So the stomach is basic, more fundamental; when the stomach needs energy it pulls energy from everywhere.
Now he could not even sleep for three hours. His eyes became dull, dead; his body lost all luster, aliveness, and there was a subtle trembling. Holding his hand, I could feel his whole body trembling; the body had not rested for months. And now he thought that he was becoming spiritual. This type of nonsense has continued long enough to have become respectable. When a thing continues for long enough it becomes respectable just because it has been there for so long.
In fact, listen to your body, your bodily needs. Listen to your mind, listen to your mind’s needs. Don’t avoid. Go into those needs, explore those needs with loving care. Befriend your body, befriend your mind, if you want to get beyond them one day. Befriending is very essential. That is the Tantra vision of life: Befriend life energies. Don’t become antagonistic.
Now the sutras. The sutras are of great significance. Says Saraha to the king:

As higher awareness, they teach what they experience within. What fetters them they will call liberation. A glass trinket colored green to them is a priceless emerald. Deluded, they know not a gem from what they think it should be.
He is talking about the so-called mahatmas, the so-called yogis, in the same way that I talk again and again about the so-called saints. Saraha is saying:
As higher awareness, they teach what they experience within.
Now this is a great statement. It has to be decoded. First: the ultimate experience of reality is not an experience at all, because when you experience something there is always duality the experiencer and the experienced. So there cannot be any ultimate experience in the sense that you experience yourself, no. How can you experience yourself? Then you will be divided in two, then the subject-object duality will come in. Tantra says: Whatsoever you know, know that you are not that. This is a great statement, a very penetrating insight. If you see something, know well that you are not that thing, because you are the seer. You can never be the seen. You cannot be reduced to an object. You are subjectivity, pure subjectivity, irreducible subjectivity; there is no way to turn yourself into an object, into a thing. You cannot put yourself in front of yourself, or can you? You cannot put yourself in front of yourself, because whatsoever you put there will not be you. You will always be the one in front of whom the thing is put.
Saraha says: Truth is not an experience cannot be. Truth is an experiencing, not an experience. It is a knowing, not knowledge. The difference is great. You experience a thing when it is separate from you. You cannot experience yourself in the same way. So Tantra has coined a different word: ’experiencing’. In Sanskrit we have two words: anubhav, anubhuti. Anubhav means experience; anubhuti means experiencing. There is nothing to experience. There is nothing in front of you, there is just emptiness; but you are there, fully there, with nothing to obstruct. There is no object ...pure subjectivity: only the container, no content. The movie has stopped...only the screen, the pure white screen.... But there is nobody to look at this white screen: you are the white screen. Hence a new word: anubhuti, experiencing.
In English there is no separate word, so I have to use ’experi-encing’. To show the difference: experience becomes an object, experiencing is a process, not an object. Knowledge is an object; knowing is a process. Love is an object; loving is a process.
And Tantra says: Your innermost core consists of processes, not of things. Knowing is there, no knowledge. Loving is there, no love. Nouns exist not, only verbs! This is a profound insight into reality. Only verbs. When you say, ”This is a tree,” you are stating a very wrong thing: this is a tree-ing, not a tree, because it is growing, it is not a static thing. When you say, ”This is a river,” just look at what you are saying nonsense. It is a river-ing, it is moving, it is dynamic. Not for a single moment is it the same, so why do you call it ’river’? Even a rock is not a rock, it is also a process.
Existence consists not of things but of events. Don’t say to a woman, ”I love you.” Just say, ”I am in that state of loving.” Love is not a thing; you can only be in a state of loving, you cannot love. There are Buddhist languages in which everything exists as a process. When for the first time the Bible was being translated in certain Buddhist countries Burma, Thailand the Christian missionaries were at a loss, they could not find a word for God. Because it is okay if you say a river is river-ing and a tree is tree-ing, and a man is man-ing and a woman is woman-ing it is okay. But about God he is! There is no becoming in God. But in Burmese all words are verbs really. Each verb shows becoming. But to call God ’becoming’, a process, was very hard for Christians, very difficult. God is...always the same, eternally the same. Nothing ever happens to God. Buddhists say if nothing ever happens to God, then he is dead, then how can he be alive? Life is where things happen. Life is happening. And about the ultimate experience.... It is okay to say this about mundane reality. You can say, ”This is a chair,” and there is no need to bother much about it; it is simple. Now to say about everything, ”This is a chair-ing and this is a tree-ing,” will create difficulty in expression. But about the ultimate reality one should be very alert. At least there one should be alert. Saraha says:
As higher awareness, they teach what they experience...
Now if you have read Pundit Gopi Krishna’s books, he says kundalini is the ultimate experience. It cannot be. Saraha would not agree, he would laugh at Pundit Gopi Krishna.
If you experience a certain energy rising in your spine, you are the one who is seeing it. The spine is separate, so also is that kundalini rising in it separate. How can you be it? I can see this hand: just by seeing this hand I have become separate from this hand. I cannot be this hand. I am using this hand, but I am separate from this hand. Maybe I am inside the hand, but I cannot be the hand.

Kundalini is not a spiritual experience. A spiritual experience simply means the moment when there is nothing to be experienced. All experiences dissolved, you sit alone in your purity. You cannot call it an experience. So Saraha says: These so-called yogis and saints go on saying that they have attained to higher consciousness. And what have they attained? Somebody’s kundalini has risen, somebody has seen a blue light inside, and things like that. Somebody has seen visions: somebody has seen Krishna and somebody has seen Mohammed and somebody has seen Mahavira and somebody has seen the Mother Kali but these are all imagination. All experience is imagination.
The word imagination is beautiful; it comes out of ’image’. All experience is nothing but images floating in your consciousness. When nothing floats in your consciousness remember, not even ’nothing’ floats in your consciousness when your consciousness is simply there without content, that contentless purity is what Tantra calls real experience. You cannot call it an experience by its very nature, it is not. When you witness the witness, how can you call it witnessing? When you know the knower, how can you call it knowledge? So the first thing he says is: As higher awareness, they teach what they experience within. And the second thing to be remembered: the distinction between within and without is again false. It is good on a certain plane you are living in the without, so you have to be told to go within. But without and within are two aspects of the same coin. One day you have to be told to drop both; as you have dropped the without, now drop the within too. Be transcendental neither without nor within.
The within is as much without as the without: that is the Tantra insight. What is within? I am looking at you, you are without. Then I close my eyes and I see my kundalini is it within? Whatsoever I can see is without, is ’out’ of me, it cannot be ’in’ me. Then I see a blue light; that is without. Of course I am seeing it with closed eyes; it is closer to me, but still without. I am seeing you with open eyes, you are without. In the night I see a dream, and you come in my dream then are you within? You are also without, although my eyes are closed; but I am seeing you just as I am seeing you right now. Whatsoever is seen is without. The seer is neither without nor within.
So Saraha says: These people first go on talking about their experiences without, and then they start talking about their experiences within.
Just the other day we discussed this: you make love to a woman this woman is without. Now the energy, the fire of your sexuality, rises high in you, comes to your throat, to vishuddha, to the throat chakra. And there you start masturbating it with your tongue turned inwards. You call it within? It is without. It is as much without as it was while you were making love to a woman.
Tantra is such a great insight, such a profound insight, that it says: One has to drop the without, one has to drop the within too. One has to be in such a state that one can say I am neither out nor in, neither an extrovert nor an introvert, neither a man nor a woman, neither a body nor a mind. One has to come to a point where one can say I am neither in samsara, nor nirvana. This is the point, the door from all dualities, the exact middle of all dualities.
What fetters them they will call liberation.
Now this will be a new fetter, maybe a little more beautiful than the outer fetters maybe the outer fetters are made of iron and this fetter is made of gold but a fetter is a fetter. Whether made of iron or of gold does not make any difference; you are fettered.
Now this new fetter will become your bondage. Kundalini rising, visions, spiritual visions, cosmic visions now these will become your fetters. Now you will hanker for them, now you will desire them. First you were desiring money, now you will desire these spiritual experiences. First you were desiring power, now you will desire siddhis, spiritual powers but the desire remains there, and the desire is the fetter. Only in non-desire is there liberation. A glass trinket colored green to them is a priceless emerald. Deluded, they know not a gem from what they think it should be. If you don’t know, if you are not alert and aware, you can be deceived. A glass trinket colored green...and you may think this is an emerald. Yes, the color is the same, the shape may be the same, even the weight may be the same, but still the value is different and the value is the thing. Yes, people have powers in the outside world. A president, a premier has some power, and then a yogi, a mahatma has some other powers of the inner world, but nothing to be compared with the real emerald. The outer was a glass thing and this inner is also a glass trinket: colored, cut in the same shape, of the same weight as if it were the spiritual thing. It is not.
Spirituality is the pure sky where no cloud exists. So a real spiritual man cannot claim any spiritual experiences, because all spiritual experiences are glass trinkets colored green; they are not emeralds. That’s why Buddha remained silent. When people would ask him, ”Have you realized?” he would keep quiet. When people would say, ”Do you know God?” he would not say anything, he would smile or laugh it away. Why? Why did he avoid it? ...And foolish people will think he avoided because he had not known, he avoided because he had not experienced. He avoided because he had experienced. He avoided because he knew that to talk about it would not be good; that would be a sacrilege.
Truth cannot be talked about. We can talk about the way but we cannot talk about the truth. We can talk about how to attain to it, but we cannot say what it is when we attain it. Saraha is saying: All those who claim experiences are bogus:
Deluded, they know not a gem from what they think it should be.
They take copper to be gold. Bound by discursive thought, they think these thoughts to be ultimate reality. They long for the pleasures experienced in dreams. They call the perishable body-mind eternal bliss supreme. They take copper to be gold.... The baser, the objective, they think is the subjective. The knower is not known yet. They have known something else and they have misunderstood; they think they have known the knower. They may have known the kundalini, they may have known some spiritual visions great visions of poetry, great visions of splendor and grandeur great visions, psychedelic, but:
They take copper to be gold. Bound by discursive thought, they think these thoughts to be ultimate reality. And these so-called saints and mahatmas are bound by logic, bound by discursive thought.... They go on arguing; they even go on trying to prove that God exists.
In Christianity, two thousand years have been wasted in proving that God exists. How can you prove that God exists? And if it can be proved then it can be disproved too. Logic is a double-edged sword, logic is a whore. If it can prove that God is, it can prove that God is not. And in fact the beauty of it is this: the same argument can prove that God is, and the same argument can prove that God is not.
Now the greatest argument that these so-called saints have been giving to the world is that the world needs a creator, because how can the world exist without a creator? Now it looks appealing, to childish minds at least; to immature minds it looks appealing. Yes, such a vast existence how can it be there without a creator? Somebody must be there who created it. And then just a small pinprick and the logic is gone and the balloon explodes. Somebody asks, ”Then who created the creator?” It is the same logic. If you say the world needs a creator, then again your creator will need a creator, and so on and so forth, ad nauseam. You can go on and you can say number one created the world, and number two created number one, and number three created number two...you can go on and on. But the ultimate question will remain the same: Who created the first, the original? If you accept that the original was not created, then what is all this fuss about? Then why not say that the world is uncreated? If God can be uncreated, then what is wrong in simply saying that the world has been there without anybody having created it? That would seem more reasonable, rather than going into this foolish logic which leads nowhere.
Look at the arguments that have been given for God: they are all foolish and stupid. That’s why you cannot convince a single atheist about your God. Those who are already convinced, yes, they are convinced; that is not the point. You cannot convince a single skeptical mind, your arguments will not help; in fact your own arguments will create difficulties for you.
What is Saraha saying? Saraha is saying: A man who has known his inner reality knows that there is no proof other than realizing it. He does not believe in discursive thoughts. He does not give any logic for it; it is illogical, it is beyond reason. It is so. You can experience it or you can leave it, but there is no way to prove it or disprove it. Theism and atheism are both meaningless. Religion has nothing to do with them; religion is an experiencing of that which is. Call it by whatsoever name you choose to call it: call it God, call it nirvana, call it XYZ, anything, that doesn’t matter but experience it. Tantra believes in experience; Tantra is not cerebral, it is existential. They take copper to be gold...and this God proved by arguments they think is their God. Then they make images of the God, and then they worship; they are worshipping their own syllogism. What is in your churches and temples and mosques? nothing but syllogism. The world needs a creator, so you believe in a creator. This is a belief, and all beliefs are false. Belief is a home-made thing. Yes, it consoles, it gives you a certain security, comfort. It is convenient to believe that somebody is looking after the world, otherwise one becomes afraid: nobody looking after it, at any moment anything could go wrong. It gives you confidence. It is almost like when you are in an airplane and you know that the pilot is there and he is looking after things. And suddenly you go and look into the cockpit and there is nobody! Now what will happen? Just a moment before you were sipping tea and you were talking, and you were interested in the woman who was sitting by your side and you were trying to touch her body, and everything.... Now everything is gone the pilot is not there! Up to this moment everything was convenient. You will become very nervous, you will start trembling; you will lose all interest in men and women, and food and drink, and everything is finished! Your breathing will be disturbed, your blood pressure will be disturbed, your heart will start fluttering and you will start perspiring...in an air-conditioned plane!
It is convenient to believe that in the cockpit there is a pilot who knows and everything is going well God takes care. You can remain the way you are. He is ’the Father’, he knows everybody. Not even a single leaf falls without his will, so everything is good. This is a convenience. Mind is very cunning. This God is part of the cunning mind.
Saraha says: Belief is not truth, and truth is never a belief. Truth is an experiencing. They think these thoughts to be ultimate reality. They long for the pleasures experienced in dreams. These are pleasures experienced in dreams.
They call the perishable body-mind eternal bliss supreme.
Sometimes you are deluded by the body, and somehow if you manage to go beyond the body you are deluded by the mind, which is more of a deluder. The first three chakras belong to the body. The next three chakras belong to the mind. And the seventh chakra is beyond both.
Ordinarily the people who indulge remain in the first three, the lower chakras, they hang there. Those first three chakras muladhar, swadhishthan and manipura are earthbound. They are earthly chakras, they are attracted by gravitation, they are pulled downwards. The next three chakras: anahata, vishuddha and agya are skybound; gravitation does not affect them. They are under another law called levitation, they are pulled upwards. These three consist of the mind; the body is pulled downwards, mind is pulled upwards. But you are neither; you are the seventh, which is neither body nor mind.
So the people who indulge live in the first three chakras, and the people who repress the first three chakras start living in the second three chakras. But they create a dreamworld.... It is almost like this: one day you fast, and in the night you dream that you have been invited by the queen of England and a great feast is being given in your honor, and you are eating all sorts of things all the things that you always wanted to eat but the doctor wouldn’t allow. The fast creates this dream, but this dream cannot nourish you. In the morning you will be as hungry as before more so. But this dream helps a little bit. How does it help? It helps you to continue sleeping. Otherwise your hunger would wake you again and again, you would keep waking up. This dream is a trick of the mind. The mind says, ”There is no need to wake up; there is no need to go in the dark and search for the fridge. You can just sleep well. Look, the queen has invited you! There are so many foods on the table, why don’t you eat?” and you start eating. This is a trick of the mind, it helps you to keep on sleeping. It happens many times...your bladder is full and you start dreaming that you are in the bathroom. This helps not that it unburdens the bladder but it keeps you deluded and the sleep can continue. Your beliefs, your imagination, your dreams, your temples, your churches, your gurudwaras help you to remain asleep. They are tranquilizers.
They call the perishable body-mind eternal bliss supreme.... Sometimes they think the bliss supreme is there in the body, and then they start thinking in the imagination of the mind that kundalini is rising...light, and a thousand and one visions and experiences. Beware of these visions.
A really spiritually oriented person is not interested in any content of consciousness. He is interested in consciousness itself.
By the symbol EVAM they think self-clearness is achieved. By the different situations that demand four seals they call what they have fancied spontaneity. But this is looking at reflections in a mirror. Through mantras, through sounds, one can achieve a certain mental tranquility. Yes, through TM one can achieve a certain delusion. If you repeat a certain sound continuously it soothes you; it gives you a certain rhythm in the mind, it is rhythmic. If you repeat, ”Om, Om, Om,” or ”Evam, Evam, Evam,” or any mantra ...”Coca- Cola” will do; if you repeat, ”Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola,” very lovingly and respectfully, it will help. You can also keep a Coca-Cola bottle in front of you and put some flowers and fruit before it; it will help. You have to create an atmosphere... you can burn some incense before the Coca-Cola bottle and repeat the mantra. If you do it long enough, there is every possibility that you will feel good. You have auto-hypnotized yourself, you have suggested something to yourself; you have suggested that tranquility is coming, silence is coming, happiness is coming. It is nothing but auto-suggestion, very indirect auto-suggestion. Emile Cou proposes direct suggestions. Think: I am getting better, I am getting healthy, I am getting happier direct suggestions. Emile Cou is a Western man more honest, true and direct. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi suggests that you repeat, Om, Om, Ram, Ram this is indirect, more of the Eastern mind; not direct, but indirect. But all the suggestions are given that if you repeat this mantra twice every day for twenty minutes in the morning and twenty minutes in the evening you will become more healthy, you will become more silent, you will become more blissful...this and that. All things are promised even your salary will increase. You will be getting promotions and the whole world will cooperate with you in your ambitions.
This is given indirectly. And then you are not interested in the mantra, you are interested in these things: health, wealth, power, prestige, silence, joy you are interested in these things. Because of this interest you repeat the mantra. But each time you repeat ”Om,” you know that these things are going to happen. And these mantras work only to the extent that you believe in them; if you don’t believe, they won’t work. If you don’t believe, Mahesh Yogi will say, ”How can they work? You have to believe them, then they work.” Truth works without your belief; truth needs no belief on your part. Only untruth works through belief. Untruth needs belief on your part, because only if you believe can you create a mind attitude, an auto-suggestion, a climate in which it works.
By the symbol EVAM they think self-clearness is achieved.
And Saraha is saying that this is nonsense. By repeating a certain sound no clarity is attained, you only become more cloudy. Not that you become more intelligent and aware, you become more sleepy. Of course you will have a better sleep, that is the good part of it. And it is not accidental that Mahesh Yogi’s TM has become influential in America, because America is the country which is suffering tremendously from insomnia. People cannot sleep, they need some trick to sleep; TM can help good sleep. And I am not against TM if you are just using it for good sleep I am all for good sleep. But remember, it cannot lead you to any other realm, it cannot become your spiritual journey; it is a solace. By the different situations that demand four seals... These four seals have to be understood. Tantra talks about four seals, four mudras. To attain to the ultimate, a person passes through four doors, he has to open four locks. Those four locks are called four seals, four mudras. These are very important.
The first mudra is called karma mudra. It is the outermost door, the very periphery of your being. It is so outermost...just like action, that’s why it is called karma mudra. Karma means action. Action is the outermost core of your being, it is your periphery; what you do is your periphery. You love somebody, you hate somebody, you kill somebody, you protect somebody what you do is your periphery. Action is the outermost part of your being.
The first seal is opened through becoming total in your action...total in your action. Whatsoever you do, do totally, and there will arise great joy not by repeating some mantra but by doing it totally. If you are angry, be totally angry; you will learn much out of total anger. If you are totally angry and fully aware of your anger, anger will disappear one day. There will be no point in being angry anymore; you have understood it, it can be dropped now.
Anything that is understood can be dropped easily. Only non-understood things go on hanging around you. So be total, whatsoever it is. Try to be total and alert: this is the first lock to be opened. Remember always, Tantra is very scientific. It does not say, repeat a mantra. It says: Become aware in your action.
The second seal is called gyana mudra a little deeper than the first, a little more inner than the first: like knowledge. Action is the outermost thing, knowledge is a little deeper. You can watch what I am doing, you cannot watch what I am knowing. Knowing is inner. Actions can be watched, knowings cannot be watched, they are inner. The second seal is that of knowing gyana mudra.
Now start knowing what you really know and stop believing things which you really don’t know. Somebody asks you, ”Is there a God?” and you say, ”Yes, God is.” Remember, do you really know? If you don’t know, please don’t say that you do. Say, ”I don’t know.” If you are honest and you only say what you know, and you only believe what you know, the second lock will be broken. If you go on knowing things, believing things which you don’t really know, the second lock will never be broken. False knowledge is the enemy of true knowledge. And all beliefs are false knowledge; you simply believe them. And your so-called saints go on telling you: First believe, then you will know.
Tantra says: First know, then belief is there. But that is a totally different kind of belief; it is trust. You believe in God, you know the sun. The sun rises, you need not believe in it; it is simply there, you know it. God you believe in. God is bogus; your God is bogus.
There is another God the God which comes through knowing. But the first thing to be sorted out is, drop all that you don’t know but believe that you know. You have always believed and you have always carried the load. Drop that load. Out of a hundred things you will be unburdened of almost ninety-eight things unburdened. Only a few things will remain there that you really know. You will feel great freedom; your head will not be so heavy. And with that freedom and weightlessness you enter the second mudra. The second lock is broken. The third mudra is called samaya mudra. Samaya means time. The first, outermost layer is action, the second layer is knowing, the third layer is time. Knowledge has disappeared, you are only in the now; only the purest of time has remained. Watch, meditate over it. In the now-moment, there is no knowledge. Knowledge is always about the past. In the now-moment there is no knowledge, it is completely free from knowledge. Just this moment, looking at me, what do you know? Nothing is known. If you start thinking that you know this and that, that will come from the past. That will not come from this moment, not from now. Knowledge is from the past, or a projection into the future. The now is pure of knowledge.
So the third is samaya mudra to be in this moment. Why does Saraha call it samaya, time? Ordinarily you think that past, present and future are three divisions of time. That is not the Tantra understanding. Tantra says: Only present is time. Past is memory, future is imagination. Only present is time; past is not, it has already gone. Future is not; it has not come yet. Only the present is.
To be in the present is to be really in time. Otherwise you are either in memory or you are in dreams, which are both false delusions. So the third seal is broken by being in the now. First, be total in your action the first seal is broken. Second, be honest in your knowing the second seal is broken. Now, be just here-now the third seal is broken.
And the fourth seal is called mahamudra, the great gesture ...innermost, like space. Now purest space has remained. Action, knowing, time, space these are the four seals. Space is your innermost core, the hub of the wheel, or the center of the cyclone. In your innermost emptiness is space, sky. These are the three layers: the first layer is of time, then the second is of knowing, then the third is of action. These are the four seals to be broken. By reciting a mantra it is not going to happen. Don’t befool yourself. Great work is needed to go into your reality.
By the symbol EVAM they think self-clearness is achieved. By the different situations that demand four seals... Clearness is not achieved without your breaking these four seals. Clarity is attained only when you have entered your pure space.
...they call what they have fancied spontaneity. But this is looking at reflections in a mirror. Yes, you can create a mirror by chanting a mantra, and in the mirror you can see things. It is crystal-gazing, it is not of much value. It is just looking into the lake and thinking that the moon is there; the moon is not there, it only reflects there. It is looking into the mirror and thinking that you are there; you are not there. Don’t be childish small children do that. Have you watched a small child brought for the first time before a mirror? He tries to enter into the mirror...he grabs the mirror and tries to find a way to go into it and meet the child who is there. When he finds it difficult, he tries to go through the back of the mirror: maybe there is a room and the child is sitting there. This is what we go on doing.
Mind is a mirror. Yes, by repeating a TM mantra you can make this mirror very, very clear. But looking into the mirror you will not attain. In fact the mirror has to be completely dropped, thrown away. You have to move inwards. And this is very practical: first action, then knowing, then time, then space. As under delusion’s power a herd of deer will rush for the water in a mirage which is not recognized, so also the deluded quench not their thirst, are bound by chains and find pleasure in them, saying that all is ultimately real. This is the last sutra.
Saraha says: Looking into the mirror you are looking into a mirage. You are dreaming. You are helping an illusion to be created around yourself, you are cooperating in a dream. As under delusion’s power a herd of deer will rush for the water in a mirage which is not recognized, so also the deluded quench not their thirst, are bound by chains...
We are deluded by the reflections that are happening in our mind.
I have heard a beautiful story....
A man wishing to walk in the Welsh mountains made his headquarters at a pub in a country town. He found his evenings dull, for nothing happened, and pub conversation was mostly about sheep, mostly about Wales. He asked the landlord how to set about finding the ladies of the town, and that worthy was shocked. ”Look man, this is Wales. We cannot have prostitutes the chapel would never allow it.” The visitor looked sad and the landlord continued, ”Of course we have human nature the same as anywhere, but the thing you mention is kept out of sight.” He went on to explain that up the mountain, at the back, were caves, well-furnished and with all mod. cons. What the stranger must do was go up to the mountain at dusk and shout, ”Yoo-hoo!” and if the lady ”Yoo-hooed” back, terms could be negotiated. If she was already engaged, there would be no answer.

That evening the Englishman yoo-hooed his way from cave to cave, but with no luck at all; he finally decided to go back and get drunk. But at the foot of the mountain he found a fresh cave. ”Yoohoo!” he shouted. ”Yoo-hoo! Yoo-hoo!” came back so clearly.
He rushed into the cave and was killed by a train.
That is what a mirage is: you imagine, you fantasize, then you start seeing. And then any excuse will do. When a man is thirsty in a desert, lost, and the thirst burns like a flame inside and he thinks only of water only of water and nothing else there is every possibility that he will start seeing water somewhere. He will project it; his desire is so much that he will project it. He will start seeing illusory lakes, he will think a cool breeze has come. He will think he has seen a few birds flying, he will even think that he can see a few green trees not only green trees, but their reflections in the water. He will rush.
That’s how we have been rushing for millions of lives...yoo-hooing from one cave to another. And you don’t see that each time you go you don’t find any water, the thirst is not quenched. But you don’t learn anything. The greatest problem with man is that he does not learn. You loved one woman or one man, you were thinking that your thirst would be quenched it is not quenched. But you don’t learn anything, you start moving towards another cave. You have no money and you thought that if ten thousand rupees were there everything would be okay. And then those ten thousand rupees also happen, but you have not learned anything. By that time you start thinking, ”Unless there is one lakh of rupees, how can I be happy?” One lakh also happens, but you have not learned anything yet; now you think that unless ten lakhs are there, how can I be happy? And so on and so forth you go...from one cave to another, from one birth to another, from one death to another. Man seems to be almost incapable of learning. Those who learn, only they know.
Start learning. Be a little more alert; let each experience give you some knowing. You have asked so many times for so many things and nothing happened. Now stop asking. You desired so many things and each desire led you into frustration. Still you go on desiring? You did the same thing yesterday and the day before yesterday, and you will be doing the same thing today and tomorrow too and nothing comes out of it. And you go on moving and doing the same thing again and again.
To learn is to become religious. The word disciple is beautiful, it means one who is capable of learning. It comes from a root which means ’learning’; one who is capable of learning is a disciple. Become disciples...disciples of your own life. Life is really your master. And if you cannot learn from life, where else can you learn from? If even the great master life is defeated by you and cannot teach you anything, then who will be able to teach you anything?
This universe is a university. Each moment is a lesson, each frustration is a lesson. Each time you fail, learn something! By and by, the ray of knowing enters. Inch by inch one becomes alert; inch by inch one becomes capable of not repeating the old mistakes. The moment you start learning you are coming closer to God. And don’t trust small knowings, don’t think that you have arrived. A small learning sometimes satisfies people so much... then they stop, then they stop moving. It is a great journey, it is an endless journey. The more you learn, the more you will be able to learn. The more you learn, the more you will become aware that much more is yet to be learned. The more you know, the more intense becomes the mystery. The more you know, the less you feel that you know. With knowing, new doors open. With knowing, new mysteries are revealed. So don’t be satisfied with a little knowledge. Unless God reveals himself to you, never be content. Let there be great spiritual discontent.
Only those who are fortunate enough to have this divine discontent in them that nothing less than God will satisfy them only they arrive. Nobody else.
Enough for today.
Tantric Transformation

Chapter 4 Trust cannot be betrayed


Question 1
The first question:
Osho, Why am I always interested in married women?
There is nothing special about it, it is a very common disease which exists in almost epidemic proportions. But there are reasons to it. Millions of people, men and women both, are more interested in the married person. First, the unmarried person shows that nobody has yet desired him or her; the married person shows that somebody has desired him. And you are so imitative that you cannot even love on your own. You are such a slave that when somebody else is loving somebody, only then can you follow. But if the person is alone and nobody is in love with them, then you are suspicious. Maybe the person is not of worth, otherwise why should he or she wait for you? The married person has great attraction for the imitator.
Secondly, people love less people, in fact, don’t know what love is; they compete more. The married man...and you become interested, or the married woman...and you become interested, because now there is a possibility to compete. The triangular fight is possible. The woman is not easily available, there is going to be struggle. In fact you are not interested in the woman, you are interested in the struggle. Now the woman is almost a commodity; you can fight for her and you can prove your mettle. You can displace the husband and you will feel very good...an ego trip, it is not a love trip. But remember, once you succeed in disposing of the husband you will not be interested in the woman anymore. You were interested in the married woman; how can you be interested in the unmarried woman now? again you will start looking for some fight somewhere. You will always make it a triangle. This is not love.
In the name of love there is jealousy, there is competition, there is aggression, there is violence. You want to prove yourself, you want to prove yourself against the man: Look, I have taken away your woman. Once you have taken away the woman you will not be interested in the woman at all, because she was not the desired thing; the desired thing was a sort of victory.
I have heard....
A certain prominent businessman lost his wife and the funeral became a public occasion. All the dignitaries of the town attended and almost all were known to the bereaved. There was, however, a stranger, and he seemed more upset than anyone. Before the funeral was over he broke down completely. The bereaved husband asked, ”Who was this weeping stranger?”
”Ah!” whispered someone, ”Didn’t you know? He was your late wife’s lover.” The bereaved moved across to the sobbing man, patted him on the back and said, ”Cheer up, old boy, cheer up. I shall probably marry again.”
Beware. This is a disease, to fall in love with a married woman or a married man. Look for reasons. It is not love, there is something else working behind your mind, in your unconscious. Another thing: the married woman is not easily available. That too creates desire. Easy availability kills desire. The more unapproachable, the more inaccessible the woman is, the more the desire; you can dream about her. And in fact there is not much possibility that it will ever become an actuality. There is every opportunity to be romantic about a married woman; you can play with your fantasy. It is not easy to make her available to you. You are not interested in unmarried women because they will not leave much chance for romance; if you are interested, they are ready, there is no space left. There is not that long, long waiting.
Many people are interested not in love but in waiting; they say that waiting is far more beautiful than love. In a way it is so, because while you are waiting you are simply projecting, you are dreaming. Of course your dream is your dream and you can make it as beautiful as you want. The real woman is going to shatter all your dreams. People are afraid of the real woman. And a married woman becomes more unreal than real. The same is the case with a married man; he is far away. There is not much possibility that he will really enter into a love relationship with you.
I have heard....
A young man went to a very wise old man, and the young man said, ”I am lovesick, sir. Can you help me?” The wise man thought and he said, ”There is only one cure for love, and that is marriage. And if marriage cannot cure it, nothing can cure it! If you get married you will be cured; never again will you think about love!” Yes, marriage cures it so certainly, so absolutely, that if marriage cannot cure your love, then nothing can cure it. Then you are incurable. It is good to fall in love with a married woman because then there is no possibility of cure; you remain lovesick.
There are people who enjoy their lovesickness tremendously: weeping, crying, waiting, fantasizing, poeticizing, reading, writing poetry, painting, making music all substitutes. The real woman is dangerous. The real woman only looks musical from far away. Come close and she is a real woman. She is not a fairy, not a fiction; her reality will have to be reckoned with. And when a woman comes close to you, not only is she real but she brings you down from your ivory towers to the earth.
In all the cultures of the world woman is represented as the earth and man as the sky. The woman is very earthbound; she gravitates towards the earth. She is more earthly than man, more practical, more pragmatic than man. That’s why you don’t find great women poets, you don’t find great women painters or great women composers, no. They don’t fly in the sky so much. They grip the earth, they penetrate the earth with their roots and stand there like strong trees. Man is more like a bird. When man becomes married, the woman brings him also to the earth, to the practical world. Poets don’t like to be married. They want to remain in love always, they don’t want to cure that sickness.
People fall in love with a married woman this is a halfway house, it is a trick. They can believe that they are in love and they can avoid it also. Love creates great fear because love is a challenge, a great challenge. You will have to grow. You cannot remain juvenile and immature; you will have to grapple with the realities of life. Your so-called great poets are almost always very childish, immature people, still living in the fairyland of childhood. They don’t know what reality is, they don’t allow the reality to penetrate into their dreams. A woman is a sure destroyer of fictions. She is not fictitious, she is a fact, a truth. So if you want to believe that you are in love and you still want to avoid love, it is good, safe, to fall in love with a married woman or a married man. This is very tricky, this is a deception, a self-deception. Women are also afraid to fall in love with a free man, because with the free man or free woman there is involvement a twenty-four-hour involvement. With a married woman the involvement is not that big. You can have a few stolen kisses, you can meet her somewhere in a dark corner, always afraid that the husband may be coming, somebody may see. It is always halfhearted, it is always in a hurry, and you don’t come to know the woman as she is in her twenty-four-hour life. You come to know only her painted face, you come to know only her performance, not her truth.
When a woman comes out of her house ready to go shopping, she is not the same woman. She is almost a different person: now she is a managed woman, now she is a performer. Women are great actresses. In the house they don’t look so beautiful; out of the house they suddenly become tremendously beautiful, joyful, cheerful, delighted. They again become small, giggling girls in love with life. Their faces are different, radiant: their eyes are different, their makeup, their performance....
Seeing a woman on the beach or in the shopping center, you are seeing a totally different kind of reality. To live with a woman twenty-four hours a day is very mundane, it has to be. But if you really love a woman you would like to know her reality, not her fiction, because love can exist only with reality. And love is capable enough of knowing the reality and yet to love her, of knowing all the defects and yet to love her. Love is a tremendous strength.
When you are with a person twenty-four hours a day, man or woman, you come to know all the defects: all that is good and all that is bad too, all that is beautiful and all that is ugly too, all that is like light-rays and all that is like dark night. You come to know the whole person. Love is strong enough to love the other knowing all the defects, limitations, frailties that a human being is prone to. But this fictitious love is not strong enough. It can only love a woman on the movie screen. It can only love a woman in a novel, it can only love a woman in poetry. It can only love the woman as a faraway, distant star. It can only love a woman who is not real. Love is a totally different dimension: it is falling in love with reality. Yes, reality has defects, but those defects are challenges to growth. Each defect is a challenge to transcend it. And when two persons are really in love, they help each other to grow. They look into each other, they become mirrors to each other, they reflect each other. They help each other, they hold each other. In good times, in bad times, in moments of happiness, in moments of sadness, they are together, they are involved. That’s what involvement is all about. If I am only with you when you are happy and I am not with you when you are unhappy, this is not involvement; this is exploitation. If I am only with you when you are flowing and I am not with you when you are not flowing, then I am not with you at all. Then I don’t love you, I love only myself and I love only my pleasure. When you are pleasurable, good; when you become painful I will throw you away. This is not love, this is not involvement, this is not commitment. This is not respect for the other person.
It is easy to love somebody else’s wife because he has to suffer the reality and you enjoy the fiction; it is a very good division of labor. But this is inhuman. Human love is a great encounter. And love is only if growth happens out of it, otherwise what type of love is it?
Lovers are enhanced by each other, in every way. Lovers reach to higher peaks of happiness when they are together, and they also reach to the deeper depths of sadness when they are together. Their range of happiness and sadness becomes vast: that’s what love is. Alone, if you cry and weep your tears don’t have much depth. Have you watched it? Alone, they are shallow. When you weep together with somebody then there is a depth, a new dimension to your tears.
Alone you can laugh, but your laughter will be shallow. In fact it will be something insane only mad people laugh alone. When you laugh with somebody there is a depth in it, there is sanity in it. Alone you can laugh, but the laughter will not go very deep cannot go. Together, it goes to the very core of your being. Two persons together, together in all the climates day and night, summer and winter in all the moods, grow.
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The tree needs all the climates and all the seasons. Yes, it needs the burning hot summer and it needs the ice-cold winter. It needs the daylight, the sun showering on it, and it needs the silence of night so it can close into itself and go into deep sleep. It needs silent, cheerful, joyful days, it needs gloomy, cloudy days too. It grows through all these dialectics.
Love is a dialectic. Alone you cannot grow. Remember always that if you are in love, then don’t avoid commitment, don’t avoid involvement. Then go totally into it. Then don’t just stand on the periphery ready to escape if things get too troublesome.
And love is a sacrifice too. You have to sacrifice much...your ego. You have to sacrifice your ambition, you have to sacrifice your privacy, you have to sacrifice your secrets; you have to sacrifice many things. So just to be in a romantic love needs no sacrifice. But when there is no sacrifice there is no growth. Love changes you almost utterly; it is a new birth. You are never the same person again as you were before you loved a woman or a man. You have passed through fire, you are purified. But courage is needed. You ask: ”Why am I always interested in married women?” Because you are not courageous. You want to avoid the involvement. You want it cheaply, you don’t want to pay the price for it.

Question 2

The second question:

Merciful Master, It is not making love any more... I feel I am in a temple with you all over. At this moment I’m aware which I never was before I met you. Everything is different every time for me and the other half. Thanking you is never adequate at that moment. And yet we slip back. How can we take off? How can I take the help of the woman outside to be united with the woman inside me?
The question is from Anand Kul Bhushan. The first thing: Never think of the woman as ’the other half’; she is not, neither are you. You are whole, she is whole. She is an individual and you are an individual. You are complete and she is complete. That old attitude that the woman is the other half has proved a great disaster. The moment you start possessing it is a sort of possession the moment you start destroying the individuality of the other, you are destroying something of great value. It is uncreative. Never think about the woman as the other half she is not!
Two lovers are like two pillars in a temple: that’s how Kahlil Gibran says it. They support the same roof, but they are aloof, they are not together. If the two pillars of the temple come very close, the temple will fall down, the roof will not be supported at all. Look at these pillars in the Chuang Tzu Auditorium: they stand aloof they support the same roof. So should lovers be: aloof, individual, and yet supporting something in common. The wife is not half of the husband nor is the husband half of the wife. Neither is the husband surrendered to the wife nor is the wife surrendered to the husband; they are both surrendered to the love god. Remember it; it has proved really paralyzing otherwise. Certainly man has not suffered much...because it is man’s idea about woman that she is the other half. He does not think that he himself is also the other half, no; it is man’s idea that the woman is the other half. Man remains whole, the woman becomes the other half. That’s why after marriage the woman has to take the husband’s name, not the husband. She disappears, she is destroyed; she is no longer a woman, she is a wife. The wife is an institution. The man still remains the man he was before. Something is added to the man, but something has been taken away from the woman. This is ugly. The other day I was reading the beautiful poem of a woman:
”Tell me not about your love,” she says to her lover...
Tell me not about your love,
I know it well.
I’ve felt it in your glance,
Felt it from the lash of the whip
And worse,
From out your tongue.
Tell me not of your love;
It is so fluid
It has drowned me and mine
In its burning intensity.
I have but few places left unscarred The heat of your love has all but consumed my brain, The security of your love has rendered me fatherless,
The gift of your love branded me bastard.
The testimony of your love has imprisoned me,
Your song of love has made me voiceless.

I shall sing no more.
I am no more.
You have loved me into oblivion.
Let me repeat: ”You have loved me into oblivion.”
Then love has not proved much of love; it is a subtle way of domination. And when there is domination, love disappears. When there is possession, love disappears.
Please don’t possess a woman and don’t possess a man. Possession, possessiveness is not love. Remember, the woman has to remain intact as an individual. Her freedom has not to be destroyed, her freedom has to be respected whatsoever it means. This is the Tantra vision: Whatsoever it means unconditionally her freedom has to remain intact. If you really love her you will love her freedom too, and she will love your freedom. If you love a person, how can you destroy his or her freedom? If you trust a person, you trust her or his freedom too. One day it happened, a man came to me who was really in a mess, very miserable. And he said, ”I will commit suicide.”
I said, ”Why?”
He said, ”I trusted my wife and she has betrayed me. I had trusted her absolutely, and she has been in love with some other man, and I never came to know about it until just now. I have got hold of a few letters...so then I inquired, and then I insisted, and now she has confessed that she has been in love all the time. I will commit suicide,” he said.
I said, ”You say you trusted her?”
He said, ”Yes, I trusted her and she betrayed me.”
”What do you mean by trust? Some wrong notion about trust ...trust also seems to be political. You trusted her so that she would not betray you. Your trust was a trick; now you want to make her feel guilty. This is not trust.”
He was very puzzled. He said, ”What do you mean by trust then, if this is not trust? I trusted her unconditionally.” I said, ”If I were in your place, trust would mean to me that I trust her freedom and I trust her intelligence and I trust her loving capacity. If she falls in love with somebody else, I trust that too. She is intelligent, she can choose. She is free, she can love. I trust her understanding.”
What do you mean by trust? When you trust her intelligence, her understanding, her awareness, you trust it. And if she finds that she would like to move into love with somebody, it is perfectly okay. Even if you feel pain, that is your problem, it is not her problem.
And if you feel pain, that is not because of love, that is because of jealousy. What kind of trust is this, that you say it has been betrayed? My understanding of trust is that it cannot be betrayed. By its very nature, by its very definition, trust cannot be betrayed. It is impossible to betray trust. If trust can be betrayed, then it is not trust.
Think over it. If I love a woman, I trust her intelligence infinitely, and if in some moments she wants to be loving to somebody else, it is perfectly good. I have always trusted her intelligence; she must be feeling like that. She is free; she is not my other half, she is independent. And when two persons are independent individuals, only then there is love. Love can flow only between two freedoms.
I understand Kul Bhushan’s question. He has used this word ’other half’ unconsciously. I have seen his love for his wife, I have seen his wife’s love for him. They are not each other’s halves, not at all; it is just an unconscious habit of using a word. But I wanted to make it clear.
The second thing: ”It is not making love any more....” When love grows deep it becomes something else. When love does not grow it becomes something else. Love is a very delicate thing. If it does not grow, it becomes bitter, it becomes poisoned; it becomes hatred. It can even fall below hatred it can become indifference, which is the farthest from love.
Love is a hot energy. So is hate hot. But indifference is cold, frozen. You can think about love and hate and indifference on this scale. Exactly between hate and love there is a zero point just like in a thermometer there is a zero point; below it is coldness, above it is warmth. Love is warmth. That zero point is hatred; below it you become even more cold, more cold, you can become ice-cold indifferent. If love does not grow, it starts falling downwards. It has to move.
Love is energy; energy moves. If it moves, soon you will find it is no longer love; it has become meditation, it has become prayer.
That’s the whole approach of Tantra that if love grows rightly, if love is tended carefully, it becomes prayer. It becomes, finally, the ultimate experience of God.

Love is the temple of God.
So people who live in indifference cannot know God. Indifference is the real atheism. People who live in a cold sort of way...even the courts understand this. If somebody has been murdered in a hot way the courts don’t take it too seriously; if somebody has been murdered out of passion, then the courts take a lenient view of it. Then the murderer has not to be punished too severely. It was just an act of passion; out of sudden rage it happened. But the courts are very hard when there is a murder of cold calculation. The cold murderer is the most dangerous man. He prepares everything in detail; he thinks, broods, contemplates about it, he calculates. He moves in a very, very mechanical and efficient way; very skilfully he goes about his job. He has no heart, he is just cold.
The cold heart is the dead heart. The cold heart is the dead, dried, fossil heart. If love does not go higher, it will go lower, remember; it cannot remain static, that is the point to be understood. Love cannot remain in a stasis; either it falls down or it goes up, but it goes. So if you really want to live a life of warmth, help love to grow.
Two persons fall in love...if their love does not immediately start becoming friendship, sooner or later there is going to be a divorce. Friendship should grow out of love; otherwise enmity will grow. Something is bound to happen. Love is an opening. Immediately start growing in friendship; otherwise enmity will grow. Something is bound to grow.
Love is fertile. If you are not sowing the seeds of beautiful flowers, then weeds will grow but something is bound to grow. When love really moves deeper, it becomes prayer. Then the whole quality is non-sexual, then the quality is non-sensuous. Then you have a certain feeling of reverence for the other not sexual lust at all, but some awe. In the very presence of the other you start feeling something divine, something sacred. Your beloved becomes your goddess or your god.
”It is not making love any more...I feel I am in a temple with you all over.” That’s right, you are blessed. ”At this moment I am aware which I never was before I met you.” The more love becomes prayer, the more awareness will happen, just like a shadow.
This is my insistence: if awareness happens, then comes love as the shadow comes love. If love happens, then as the shadow comes awareness. Either you grow in love, or you grow in meditation, but the ultimate result is the same. Both come together: you try one and the other comes. It depends on you. If you feel more in tune with love, then love is your path the path of the devotee, bhakta. If you feel more in tune with awareness, then the path of meditation, dhyana. These are the only basic paths; all other paths are combinations of these two. If love grows, you will become more and more aware at every moment of it. The higher it goes, the higher will become your insight into things.
”Thanking you is never adequate at that moment....”
It cannot be, and there is no need. In fact many times when we say thank you, we don’t mean it. Somebody passes salt at the table and you say thank you do you mean it? You don’t mean it, it is just a formality. Between a master and a disciple there should be no formality; there is no need, I am not passing salt to you. ’Thank you’ is a Western mannerism; in the East it is almost impossible. I have never thanked my father, I cannot. How can I thank my father? I have not thanked my mother. I have everything to thank her for, but I have not thanked her. How can I? It would be too inadequate, it would be too embarrassing, even to say thank you. It would be too formal, it would lack love. It is better to keep silent about it. She understands. Between a master and a disciple there is no formality possible, all formality will be always inadequate. But there is no need. I understand, Kul Bhushan. I can see your heart full of gratitude. Only in silence can it be said. It can be said without saying it; if you try to say it, it will never look right. ”Thanking you is never adequate at that moment. And yet we slip back. How can we take off? How can I take the help of the woman outside to be united with the woman inside?”
Slipping back is natural. The past is so big and the present moment is so small. The pull of the past is so great, and this awareness is just like a new leaf coming out of the tree fresh, young, delicate, vulnerable. And the past is like a great Himalaya rocks and rocks and rocks. This small leaf and this great Himalaya of rocks...this leaf had to fight this Himalaya of a past of thousands of lives lived mechanically, lived unconsciously. But still this small leaf will prove stronger than the whole Himalaya of rocks and rocks and rocks. Why? because this leaf is alive...alive with love, aflame with love. This leaf is the leaf of awareness. It is going to win. But many times you will feel that you have slipped that’s natural. Don’t be worried about it, don’t feel guilty about it. Whenever you remember, again start growing. Always keep the new leaf in your consciousness. Pour your whole consciousness into this new insight that is growing in you. In the beginning these moments are bound to be few and far between. But even if once in a while this moment comes when love is no longer love and has become prayer, you are in a Tantra moment. Don’t be worried about the dark nights, there is no need to worry. Move from day to day. Remember the day to day.
There will be nights sometimes very long nights. Think about those nights just as tunnels of darkness. At one end is light, at the other end is light; between is the tunnel of darkness. And that too is good because it prepares your eyes to see the light more clearly. It gives rest, it relaxes. Don’t think in terms of one night to another night and the day just in between, no. Even though moments are very few and far between and very small moments they are precious jewels, shining. Just think of those moments. One moment happened today, and one moment may happen after one year. Don’t be worried about the one year, that is irrelevant; from this moment to that moment let your eyes be focused. This whole year is just a tunnel from one day to another day, from one light to another light, from one love moment to another love moment, from one awareness to another awareness. Soon the slipping will be less, and soon the slipping will disappear. But there is no need to feel guilty, no need to feel repentant about it. It is natural, accept it.
”How can I take the help of the woman outside to be united with the woman inside?” Don’t think of the ’how’; if love is there it is going to happen. And love is not a ’how’, love is not knowhow. Just love for no reason at all. Just love with reverence, with awe. Just love: seeing in the other not the body but the soul, seeing in the other not the mind but the no-mind. If you can see the no-mind in your woman, you will be able to find your inner woman very easily. Then the outside woman is just a medium: through the outer woman, via the outer woman, you will be thrown back to your inner woman. But if the other woman outside is just a body, then you are blocked. If the other woman is just a soul, an emptiness, just a zero, just a passage, then there is nothing to block you; your energy will move back and will enter and will find your own inner woman. Each woman and man can be helpful from the outside to find the inner woman and the inner man. But there is no ’how’ to it. Reverence is needed. Think in terms, meditate in terms, of the other’s divinity. The other is divine; let that attitude prevail, let that climate surround you. And it is going to happen! It is already on the way.

Question 3

The third question:

Osho, Why are people missing you? Since I took sannyas I can see their stupidity very clearly. Why can’t they see it?
Don’t be too hard on people. And it is none of your business. If they don’t want to see it, that is their decision and their freedom. Don’t even call it stupidity, because if you call it stupidity, a subtle ego will arise in you that you can see and they cannot see, that you are intelligent and they are stupid. No, this is not good. It happened once....
Mohammed went to the mosque to say his morning prayer and he took a young man with him who had never gone to the mosque before. While coming back it was a summer morning and people were still asleep while coming back, the young man said to Mohammed, ”Hazrat, look at these sinners still asleep. Is this a time to sleep? This is time to pray!” And this was the first time that he himself had gone to pray. Do you know what Mohammed said? Looking at the sky, he said, ”Sorry.” The young man said, ”To whom are you saying this?”
He said, ”To God. And I will have to go back to the mosque... and please don’t come this time. It was good that you had not gone to the mosque before; I have done something wrong by taking you. It was good that you were also asleep at least you would not have gathered this ego. Now you are a saint just because you have made one prayer, and these people are sinners. And because I took you with me my own prayer is spoiled, so I am going back. And please, never come again. At least I’m not going to take you with me.” And he went back to pray and to ask forgiveness from God. He was crying, and tears were rolling down his face.
A few days ago you took sannyas or a few weeks and you think that others are stupid? That is not right, that is not right at all. In fact a sannyasin is one who stops interfering in other people’s lives. This is an interference, this attitude. Why? If they don’t want to see me, if they don’t want to listen to me, if they don’t want to understand what is happening here, then that is their freedom. They are not stupid, this is simply their freedom; they have to be themselves.
If you gather such attitudes, that’s how fanaticism is born; then one day you can become a fanatic, then you can force them to come...”You will have to come.” Out of compassion you have to force them. That’s what religions have been doing down the centuries: Mohammedans killing Hindus, Hindus killing Mohammedans, Christians killing Mohammedans, Mohammedans killing Christians. For what? out of compassion. They say, ”We will take you on the right path. You are going astray, we cannot allow you to go astray.” Freedom means total freedom. Freedom means to go astray too. If you don’t allow a person to go astray, then what type of freedom is this? If you tell a child, ”You are free only to do the right and I am deciding what is right; you are not free to do the wrong and I am deciding what is wrong” what type of freedom is this? Who are you to decide what is right? Let everybody decide for himself.
It is very easy to gather such attitudes. That’s why, down the ages, this foolishness has happened: millions of people have been killed in the name of love, in the name of God. How was it possible? Christians were thinking that they were doing a great duty, because they thought, ”Unless you come through Jesus, you will never come to God.” If you look at their logic, it seems very, very compassionate. If this is really the case that you can come to God only through Jesus then those people who were burning and killing and punishing people were really great saints.
But that is the problem. Mohammedans think that you can only come through Mohammed; Mohammed is the latest prophet, Jesus is out of date already. God has sent another message more improved; a new edition has come. So why bother about Jesus when Mohammed has come? Certainly the latest one should be the best, so you have to come through Mohammed. Now there is only one God and there is only one prophet of God, and that is Mohammed. And if you don’t listen they are ready to kill you just out of love, for your own good. And listen to the Hindus they say that this is all nonsense, the first edition is the best, the Vedas. Why? because God cannot commit any errors, so he cannot improve. The first is the best! He cannot commit any errors, so how can he improve? The first is the last, the alpha is the omega. God has given once and for all; then why these other editions? These are for stupid people who cannot understand the original. If you can understand the Vedas then there is no need to understand the Bible and the Koran; they are just meaningless. The first was the best; God trusted that man would understand. But then he found that man was very foolish, only a few wise people could understand. Then he had to lower himself down a little. It is not improvement, it is just getting down to where man is, so he gave the Bible. But still it was not understood, so he gave the Koran. Still it was not understood, so he gave the Guru Grantha. That’s how man has been falling. In the Hindu concept perfection was in the past; since then man has been falling, this is the most stupid age. Man has not been evolving, man has been falling down. It is not an evolution, Hindus say, it is an involution. So the later the book, the more ordinary it has to be because it is meant for the ordinary people. The perfect people were in the days of the Vedas.
Now there are three hundred religions on the earth, and each one claiming, and each religion ready to kill the other. They are at each other’s throats continuously. Something basic has gone wrong. This is what has gone wrong: you are asking me to allow you to become a fanatic. No, this is not going to happen with me at least at least while I am here. Others are free to do whatsoever they like, to see as they like, to interpret as they like. You are not to take it for granted that they are stupid. They have their own mind, it is beautiful. A Negro boy came home painted white and said, ”The kids at school painted me white all over.” So his mother beat him for getting messed up.
Father came home and said, ”What is going on?” So Mother told him that the kids at school had painted our Sam white. So father gave him another thrashing for not standing up for himself. Shortly afterwards a small voice was heard, ”I have only been a white boy for two hours, but I already hate you black buggers!” And you have been an orange man for just a few weeks.... Please be patient, be intelligent and respectful of others’ freedom, and others’ being, and their way, their style.

Question 4

The fourth question:

Osho, Why has sex been a taboo in all the societies down the ages?

It is a very complicated question, but very important too worth going into. Sex is the most powerful instinct in man. The politician and the priest have understood from the very beginning that sex is the most driving energy in man. It has to be curtailed, it has to be cut; if man is allowed total freedom in sex, then there will be no possibility to dominate him: to make a slave out of him will be impossible. Have you not seen it being done? When you want a bull to be yoked to a bullock-cart, what do you do? You castrate him, you destroy his sex energy. And have you seen the difference between a bull and an ox? What a difference! An ox is a poor phenom-enon, a slave. A bull is a beauty; a bull is a glorious phenomenon, a great splendor. See a bull walking, how he walks like an emperor! And see an ox pulling a bullock-cart.... The same has been done to man: the sex instinct has been curtailed, cut, crippled. Man does not exist as the bull now, he exists like the ox. And each man is pulling a thousand and one bullock-carts. Look, and you will find behind you a thousand and one bullock-carts, and you are yoked to them. Why can’t you yoke a bull? The bull is too powerful. If he sees a cow passing by, he will throw both you and the bullock-cart and he will move to the cow. He will not bother a bit about who you are and he will not listen. It will be impossible to control the bull.
Sex energy is life energy; it is uncontrollable. And the politician and the priest are not interested in you, they are interested in channelizing your energy into certain other directions. So there is a certain mechanism behind it; it has to be understood.
Sex repression, tabooing sex, is the very foundation of human slavery. And man cannot be free unless sex is free. Man cannot be really free unless his sex energy is allowed natural growth. These are the five tricks through which man has been turned into a slave, into an ugly phenomenon, a cripple. The first is: Keep man as weak as possible if you want to dominate him. If the priest wants to dominate you or the politician wants to dominate you, you have to be kept as weak as possible. Yes, in certain cases, exceptions are allowed: that is, when the services of fighting our enemy are needed; only then, otherwise not. The army is allowed many things which other people are not allowed. The army is in the service of death, it is allowed to be powerful. It is allowed to remain as powerful as possible; it is needed to kill the enemy. Other people are destroyed. They are forced to remain weak in a thousand and one ways. And the best way to keep a man weak is not to give love total freedom. Love is nourishment. Now the psychologists have discovered it, that if a child is not given love he shrivels up into himself and becomes weak. You can give him milk, you can give him medicine, you can give him everything...just don’t give love, don’t hug him, don’t kiss him, don’t hold him close to the warmth of your body, and the child will start becoming weaker and weaker and weaker. And there are more chances of dying than surviving. What happens? Why? Just hugging, kissing, giving warmth, somehow the child feels nourished, accepted, loved, needed. The child starts feeling worthy, the child starts feeling a certain meaning in his life.
Now from the very childhood, we starve them, we don’t give love as much as is needed. Then we force the young men and young women not to fall in love unless they get married. By the age of fourteen they become sexually mature. But the education may take more time ten years more, twenty-four, twenty-five years; then they will be getting their M.As, or Ph.Ds, or M.Ds, so we have to force them not to love. Sexual energy comes to its climax nearabout the age of eighteen. Never again will a man be so potent, and never again will a woman be able to have a greater orgasm than she will be able to near the age of eighteen. But we force them not to make love. We force boys to have their separate dormitories girls and boys are kept separate and just between the two stands the whole mechanism of police, magistrates, vice-chancellors, principals, headmasters. They are all standing there, just in between, just holding the boys back from moving to the girls, holding the girls back from moving to the boys. Why? Why is so much care taken? They are trying to kill the bull and create an ox.
By the time you are eighteen you are at the peak of your sexual energy, your love energy. By the time you get married, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven...and the age has been going up and up; the more cultured a country, the more you wait, because more has to be learned, the job has to be found this and that. By the time you get married you are almost declining in your powers.
Then you love, but the love never becomes really hot; it never comes to the point where people evaporate, it remains lukewarm. And when you have not been able to love totally you cannot love your children because you don’t know how. When you have not been able to know the peaks of it, how can you teach your children? How can you help your children to have the peaks of it? So down the ages man has been denied love so that he should remain weak.
Second: Keep man as ignorant and deluded as possible so that he can easily be deceived. And if you want to create a sort of idiocy which is a must for the priest and the politician and their conspiracy then the best thing is not to allow man to move into love freely. Without love a man’s intelligence falls low. Have you not watched it? When you fall in love, suddenly all your capacities are at their peak, at their crescendo. Just a moment ago you were looking dull, and then you met your woman...and suddenly a great joy has erupted in your being, you are aflame. While people are in love they perform at their maximum. When love disappears or when love is not there, they perform at their minimum.
The greatest, most intelligent people are the most sexual people. This has to be understood, because love energy is basically intelligence. If you cannot love you are somehow closed, cold; you cannot flow. While in love one flows. While in love one feels so confident that one can touch the stars. That’s why a woman becomes a great inspiration, a man becomes a great inspiration. When a woman is loved she becomes more beautiful immediately, instantly! Just a moment ago she was just an ordinary woman...and love has showered upon her, she is bathed in a totally new energy, a new aura arises around her. She walks more gracefully, a dance has come to her step. Her eyes have tremendous beauty now, her face glows, she is luminous. And the same happens to the man.

When people are in love they perform at the optimum. Don’t allow love and they will remain at the minimum. When they remain at the minimum they are stupid, they are ignorant, they don’t bother to know. And when people are ignorant and stupid and deluded, they can be easily deceived. When people are sexually repressed, love-wise repressed, they start hankering for the other life; they think about heaven, paradise, but they don’t think to create the paradise herenow.
When you are in love, paradise is herenow. Then you don’t bother, then who goes to the priest? Then who bothers that there should be a paradise? You are already there, you are no longer interested. But when your love energy is repressed, you start thinking, ”Here is nothing. Now is empty. Then there must be somewhere some goal....” You go to the priest and ask about heaven, and he paints beautiful pictures of heaven. Sex has been repressed so that you can become interested in the other life. And when people are interested in the other life, naturally they are not interested in this life. And Tantra says: This life is the only life. The other life is hidden in this life. It is not against it, it is not away from it; it is in it. Go into it. This is it! Go into it and you will find the other too. God is hidden in the world, that is the Tantra message. A great message, superb, incomparable.
God is hidden in the world, God is hidden here-now.
If you love, you will be able to feel it.
The third secret: Keep man as frightened as possible. And the sure way is not to allow him love, because love destroys fear... ”Love casteth out fear.” When you are in love you are not afraid. When you are in love you can fight against the whole world, when you are in love you feel infinitely capable of anything. But when you are not in love you are afraid of small things. When you are not in love you become more interested in security, in safety. When you are in love you are more interested in adventure, in exploration. People have not been allowed to love because that is the only way to make them afraid. And when they are afraid and trembling they are always on their knees, bowing to the priest and bowing to the politician. It is a great conspiracy against humanity. It is a great conspiracy against you. Your politician and your priest are your enemies, but they pretend that they are public servants. They say, ”We are here to serve you, to help you attain a better life. We are here to create a good life for you.” And they are the destroyers of life itself. The fourth: Keep man as miserable as possible because a miserable man is confused, a miserable man has no self-worth, a miserable man is self-condemnatory, a miserable man feels that he must have done something wrong. A miserable man has no grounding; you can push him from here to there, he can be turned into driftwood very easily. And a miserable man is always ready to be commanded, to be ordered, to be disciplined, because he knows, ”On my own I am simply miserable. Maybe somebody else can discipline my life?” He is a ready victim. And the fifth: Keep men as alienated from each other as possible, so that they cannot band together for some purpose of which the priest and the politician may not approve. Keep people separate from each other, don’t allow them too much intimacy. When people are separate, lonely, alienated from each other, they cannot band together. And there are a thousand and one tricks to keep them away.
For example: if you are holding the hand of a man you are a man and you are holding the hand of a man, and walking down to road singing you will feel guilty because people will start looking at you: are you gay, homosexual, or something? Two men are not allowed to be happy together. They are not allowed to hold hands, they are not allowed to hug each other; they are condemned as homosexuals. Fear arises. If your friend comes and takes your hand in his hand, you look around: is somebody looking or not? And you are just in a hurry to drop the hand. You shake hands in such a hurry. Have you watched it? You just touch each other’s hand and shake and you are finished; you don’t hold hands, you don’t hug each other. You are afraid. Do you remember, has your father hugged you ever? Do you remember your mother hugging you after you became sexually mature? Why not? Fear has been created. A young man and his mother hugging? Maybe some sex will arise between them, some idea, some fantasy. Fear has been created: the father and the son, the father and the daughter, no; the brother and the sister, no; the brother and the brother, no! People are kept in separate boxes with great walls around them. Everybody is classified, and there a thousand and one barriers. Yes, one day, after twenty-five years of all this training, you are allowed to make love to your wife. But now the training has gone too deep into you, and suddenly you don’t know what to do. How to love? You have not learned the language.
It is as if a person has not been allowed to speak for twenty-five years. Just listen: for twenty-five years he has not been allowed to speak a single word and then suddenly you put him on a stage and tell him, ”Give us a great lecture.” What will happen? He will fall there, then and there. He may faint, he may die...twenty-five years of silence and now suddenly he is expected to deliver a great lecture. It is not possible.

This is what is happening: twenty-five years of anti-love, of fear, and then suddenly you are legally allowed a license is issued, and now you can love this woman. This is your wife, you are her husband, and you are allowed to love. But where are those twenty-five years of wrong training going to go? They will be there. Yes, you will ’love’...you will make an effort, a gesture. It is not going to be explosive, it is not going to be orgasmic: it will be very tiny. That’s why you are frustrated after making love to a woman. Ninety-nine percent of people are frustrated after making love, more frustrated than they have ever been before. And they feel, ”What? ...There is nothing! It is not true!”
Now first the priest and the politician have managed that you should not be able to love and then they come and they preach that there is nothing in love. And certainly their preaching looks right, their preaching looks exactly in tune with your experience. First they create the experience of futility, of frustration, then... their teaching. And both look logical together, of one piece.
This is a great trick, the greatest that has ever been played upon man. These five things can be managed through a single thing, and that is the love taboo. It is possible to accomplish all these objectives by somehow preventing people from loving each other. And the taboo has been managed in such a scientific way.... This taboo is a great piece of art; great skill and great cunningness have gone into it, it is really a masterpiece. This taboo has to be understood.
First: it is indirect, it is hidden. It is not apparent, because whenever a taboo is too obvious, it will not work. The taboo has to be very hidden, so you don’t know how it works. The taboo has to be so hidden that you cannot even imagine that anything against it is possible. The taboo has to go into the unconscious, not into the conscious. How to make it so subtle and so indirect? Their trick is: first go on teaching that love is great so people never think that the priests and the politicians are against love. Go on teaching that love is great, that love is the right thing and then don’t allow any situation where love can happen, don’t allow the opportunity. Don’t give any opportunity, and go on teaching that food is great, that eating is a great joy ”Eat as well as you can” but don’t supply anything to eat. Keep people hungry and go on talking about love. So all the priests go on talking about love. Love is praised as highly as anything, just next to God, and denied every possibility of its happening. Directly encourage it; indirectly cut its roots. This is the masterpiece. No priests talk about how they have done the harm. It is as if you go on saying to a tree, ”Be green, bloom, enjoy,” and you go on cutting the roots so that the tree cannot be green. And when the tree is not green you can jump upon the tree and say, ”Listen! You don’t listen, you don’t follow us. We all go on saying ’Be green, bloom, enjoy, dance’”...and meanwhile you go on cutting the roots.
Love is denied so much...and love is the rarest thing in the world, it should not be denied. If a man can love five persons he should love five. If a man can love fifty he should love fifty. If a man can love five hundred he should love five hundred. Love is so rare that the more you can spread it the better. But there are great tricks. You are forced into a narrow, very narrow, corner: you can love only your wife, you can love only your husband, you can love only this, you can love only that; the conditions are too much. It is as if there were a law that you can breathe only when you are with your wife, you can breathe only when you are with your husband. Then breathing will become impossible, then you will die. And you will not even be able to breathe while you are with your wife or with your husband. You have to breathe twenty-four hours a day. The more you breathe the more you will be able to breathe while you are with your spouse. Be loving.
Then there is a trick again: they talk about ’higher’ love and they destroy the lower. And they say that the lower has to be denied: bodily love is bad, spiritual love is good. Have you ever seen any spirit without a body? Have you ever seen a house without a foundation? The lower is the foundation of the higher. The body is your abode, the spirit lives in the body, with the body. You are an embodied spirit and an ensouled body. You are together. The lower and the higher are not separate, they are one...rungs of the same ladder. This is what Tantra wants to make clear: the lower has not to be denied, the lower has to be transformed into the higher. The lower is good. If you are stuck with the lower the fault is with you, not with the lower. Nothing is wrong with the lower rung of a ladder. If you are stuck with it, you are stuck: it is something in you. Move. Sex is not wrong, you are wrong if you are stuck there. Move higher. The higher is not against the lower; the lower makes it possible for the higher to exist.
And these tricks have created many other problems. Each time you are in love, somehow you feel guilty; a guilt has arisen. When there is guilt you cannot move totally into love; the guilt prevents you, it keeps you holding on. Even while making love to your wife or your husband there is guilt: you know this is sin, you know you are doing something wrong. Saints don’t do it, you are a sinner. So you cannot move totally even when you are allowed superficially to love your wife. The priest is hidden behind you in your guilt feeling; he is pulling you from there, pulling your strings. When guilt arises you start feeling that you are wrong; you lose self-worth, you lose self-respect.
And another problem arises: when there is guilt you start pretending. Mothers and fathers don’t allow their children to know that they make love; they pretend, they pretend that love exists not. Their pretension will be known by the children sooner or later. When the children come to know about the pretension they lose all trust, they feel betrayed, they feel cheated. And fathers and mothers say that their children don’t respect them. You are the cause of it, how can they respect you? You have been deceiving them in every way, you have been dishonest, you have been mean. You were telling them not to fall in love ”Beware!” and you were making love all the time. And the day will come, sooner or later, when they will realize that even their father, even their mother was not true with them so how can they respect you?
First guilt creates pretension, then pretension creates alienation from people. Even the child, your own child, will not feel in tune with you. There is a barrier: your pretension. And when you know that everybody is pretending.... One day, you will come to know that you are just pretending, and so are others. When everybody is pretending, how can you relate? When everybody is false, how can you relate? How can you be friendly when everywhere there is deception and deceit? You become very, very sore about reality, you become very bitter, you see it only as a devil’s workshop.
And everybody has a false face, nobody is authentic. Everybody is carrying masks, nobody shows his original face. You feel guilty, you feel that you are pretending, and you know that everybody is pretending, everybody is feeling guilty, and everybody has become just like an ugly wound. Now it is very easy to make these people slaves to turn them into clerks, stationmasters, schoolmasters, collectors, deputy collectors, ministers, governors, presidents. Now it is very easy to distract them. You have distracted them from their roots. Sex is the root, hence the name muladhar. Muladhar means the very root energy.
I have heard....
It was her wedding night and the haughty Lady Jane was performing her marital duties for the first time. ”My Lord,” she asked her bridegroom, ”is this what the common people call lovemaking?” ”Yes, it is, my lady,” replied Lord Reginald, proceeding as before. After a while Lady Jane exclaimed indignantly, ”It is too good for the common people!” The common people have not really been allowed lovemaking: it is too good for them. But the problem is that when you poison the whole common world, you are also poisoned. If you poison the air which the common people breathe, the air that the king breathes will also be poisoned; it cannot be separate, it is all one. When the priest poisons the common people, finally he also is poisoned. When the politician poisons the common people’s air, finally he also breathes the same air; there is no other air.
A curate and a bishop were in opposite corners of a railway carriage on a long journey. As the bishop entered, the curate put away his copy of Playboy and started reading The Church Times. The bishop ignored him and went on doing the Times’ crossword. Silence prevailed.
After a while the curate tried to make conversation. And when the bishop began to do a lot of head-scratching and ’tut-tut-tutting’, he tried again. ”Can I help you, sir?” ”Perhaps. I am only beaten by one word. What is it that has four letters, the last three are u-n-t, and the clue is ’essentially feminine’?”
”Why, sir,” said the curate after a slight pause, ”That would be ’aunt’.” ”Of course, of course!” said the bishop. ”I say, young man, can you lend me a rubber?” When you repress on the surface, everything goes deep inside into the unconscious. It is there; sex has not been destroyed. Fortunately, it has not been destroyed; it has only been poisoned. It cannot be destroyed, it is life energy. It has become polluted and it can be purified. That is the whole process of Tantra: a great process of purification.
Your life problems can basically be reduced to your sex problem. You can go on solving your other problems but you will never be able to solve them because they are not true problems. And if you solve your sex problem, all problems will disappear because you have solved the base.
But you are so afraid even to look into it. It is simple: if you can put aside your conditioning, it is very simple, it is as simple as this story....
A frustrated spinster was a pest to the police; she kept ringing up saying there was a man under her bed. She was finally sent to a mental hospital, but she still told the doctors there was a man under her bed. They gave her the latest drugs and she suddenly declared that she was cured. ”You mean, Miss Rustifan, you can’t see a man under the bed now?”
”No, I can’t. I can see two.”

One doctor told the other that there was only really one sort of injection that would cure her complaint, which he called ’malignant virginity’: why did they not set her up in her bedroom with Big Dan, the hospital carpenter? Big Dan was fetched, told what her complaint was, and that he would be locked in with her for an hour. He said it would not take that long, and an anxious group gathered on the landing. They heard, ”No, stop it, Dan. Mother would never forgive me!”
”Shut up yelling, it’s got to be done some time. It should have been done years ago!” ”Have your way by force then, you brute!”
”It’s only what your husband would have done, had you had one.” Unable to wait, the medics burst in.
”I have cured her!” said the carpenter.
”He has cured me!” said Miss Rustifan.
He had sawn the legs off the bed.
Sometimes the cure is very simple, and you go on doing a thousand and one things.... And the carpenter did well, just cutting the legs off the bed and it was finished. Now where could the man hide? Sex is the root of almost all your problems. It has to be so because of thousands of years of poisoning. A great purification is needed. Tantra can purify your sex energy. Listen to the Tantra message, try to understand it. It is a great revolutionary message. It is against all priests and politicians. It is against all those poisoners who have killed all joy on the earth just so that man can be turned into reduced to a slave. Reclaim your freedom.
Reclaim your freedom to love.
Reclaim your freedom to be, and then life is no longer a problem.
It is a mystery.
It is an ecstasy.
It is a benediction.


Tantric Transformation

Chapter 5 From Nothing to nothing

Audio:Yes Video:No Length:97 mins Non-memory is convention’s truth and mind which has become no-mind is ultimate truth. This is fulfillment, this is the highest good. Friends, of this highest good become aware. In non-memory is mind absorbed; just this is emotionality perfect and pure. It is unpolluted by the good or bad of worldliness like a lotus unaffected by the mud from which it grows. Yet with certainty must all things be viewed as if they were a magic spell.... If without distinction you can accept or reject samsara or nirvana, steadfast is your mind, free from the shroud of darkness. In you will be self-being, beyond thought and self-originated.
This world of appearance has from its radiant beginning never come to be; unpatterned, it has discarded patterning. As such it is continuous and unique meditation; it is non-mentation, stainless contemplation, and no-mind.
An ancient scene...it must have been a morning like this. The trees were dancing in the morning sun and the birds were singing. And the house of a great mystic of those days, Udallaka, was celebrating the coming back of his son, Swetketu, from the house of the master where he had been sent to study. Swetketu comes. The father receives him at the door, but feels that something is missing; something is missing in Swetketu, and something is present which should not be present a subtle arrogance, a subtle ego. That was the last thing the father was waiting for.
In those ancient days education was basically the education of the non-ego. A student was sent to the forest university to live with the master so that he could dissolve himself and have a taste of existence. Rumors had been coming that Swetketu had become a great scholar. There were rumors that he had won the greatest award. And now he came, and Udallaka was not happy.
Yes, he has brought the greatest award that the university could have conferred. He has passed all the examinations, he has obtained the highest degree, and he comes loaded with much knowledge. But something is missing, and the father’s eyes are full of tears. Swetketu could not understand it. He said, ”Is something wrong? Why are you unhappy?” And the father said, ”One question: have you learned that one, by learning which everything is known, and by forgetting which all knowledge is futile, meaningless, just a burden not a help, but a harm?” Swetketu said, ”I have learned all that was available there. I have learned history, I have learned philosophy, I have learned mathematics, I have learned the Vedas. I have learned language, I have learned art, I have learned this and that....” And he listed all the names of all the sciences of those days. But the unhappiness of the father remained the same. He said, ”But have you learned that one, by learning which all is learned?” The son was a little annoyed. He said, ”Whatsoever my master could teach, I have learned. And whatsoever is written in the books, I have learned. What are you talking about? ’That one’...! Don’t be mysterious, say it exactly. What do you mean?”
Naturally there was arrogance. He had come with the idea that now he knew all. Maybe he was thinking as every student thinks that now his father knows nothing. He must have come with the idea that now he had become a great knower. And there was his old father who was not happy, and he was talking about something mysterious: the one.
And the father said, ”Do you see the tree yonder, over there? Go and bring a seed from that tree.” It was a nayagrod tree. The son brought a seed of the tree, and the father said, ”Where does the tree arise from?” And the son said, ”From this small seed, of course.”
”This big tree...from this small seed? Break the seed and see where that tree arises from that big tree.” And the seed was broken, but there was nothing. In the seed there was emptiness. And the father said, ”Can you see that emptiness from which this big tree arises?”
And the son said, ”I can infer it, but I cannot see it. How can you see nothingness?” And the father said, ”That is the one I am talking about. It is out of nothing that all comes, it is out of that creative void that all is born and one day dissolves back into. Go back and learn emptiness, go back and learn shunya. Go back, learn this void, because this is the origin of all: the source. And the source is the goal too, the beginning is the end too. Go and learn this basic, fundamental thing. All else that you have learned is rubbish! Forget about it; it is all memory, it is all mind. Learn no-mind, learn no-memory. It is all knowledge that you have learned. Learn knowing, learn awareness, learn understanding. It is objective what you have learned, but you have not penetrated to your innermost core.”
The world is thought to be a big tree. And these are the four steps in Tantra. The void is the first step the void in the seed. The seed is nothing but a container of that creative void; it contains that creative void. When the seed breaks down into the earth, that void starts sprouting into a tree. This nothingness what physicists call no-matter this nothingness, this no-thingness is the source. Out of this nothingness is born the tree. Then come flowers, fruits, and a thousand and one things. But each thing again becomes a seed and the seed falls into the earth and again becomes that voidness. This is the circle of existence: from nothing to nothing, from nowhere to nowhere. In the middle of two nowheres is the dream, the samsara. In the middle of two nothings are all things. Hence they are called dreamstuff; hence they are called maya; hence they are called nothing but thoughts, fantasies. This is the Tantra tree. No-mind is the beginning of all and the end of all. Out of no-mind arises what Tantra calls unorigination; out of unorigination arises non-memory; out of non-memory arises memory. This is the Tantra tree. No-mind, nothingness, means that all is potential, nothing is yet actual. All is possible, probable, but nothing has happened. Existence is fast asleep in the seed, resting the state of rest, the state of unmanifest being. Remember it, because only then will you be able to understand these sutras. These sutras are of great importance, because understanding them you can go into your own mind and search for the no-mind. The first state: no-mind everything is potential, nothing is actual. The second state: unorigination still nothing has become actual, but things are getting ready to become actual. In a way it is the same as the first, but with a slight difference. In the first everything is absolutely at rest; the rest is absolute, nothing may happen for millions of years. In the second nothing has happened yet, but things are ready to happen at any moment; the potentiality is ready to explode into actuality. It is like a runner who is ready to run any moment the whistle is blown. He is on the verge, he is just standing on the line, absolutely ready; once the signal is given he will be running. Unorigination means that nothing has originated yet, but it is ready to be born. Unorigination means the pregnant state. The child is in the womb, the child may come at any moment. Yes, it has not come yet, so in that way it is similar to the first state. But it is very, very ready; in that way it is not similar to the first state. The third state is called non-memory. The child is born; the experience has become actual. The world has come in, but there is still no knowledge: non-memory.
Just think of the first day a child is born. He opens his eyes, he will see these green trees, but he will not be able to recognize that they are green. How can he recognize them as green? He has never known green before. He will not even be able to recognize that they are trees. He will see the trees, but he will not be able to recognize them because he has never known them before. His perception will be pure, uncontaminated by memory; hence this state is called non-memory.

This is the state Christians talk about when Adam lived in the garden of Eden: no knowledge, he had not yet tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge. This is the state in which every child lives early in life. For a few months the child sees, listens, touches, tastes, but no recognition arises, no memory is formed. That’s why it is very difficult to remember the early days of your life. If you try to remember, you can easily go up to the fifth year. A little more effort the fourth; a little more effort and hard effort and you can go up to the third. Then suddenly there is a blank, then you cannot remember. Why not? You were alive. In fact you were so alive that you will never be so alive again. Those first three years were the most alive time of your life. Why is the memory of them not there? Why can’t you penetrate into them? Because the recognition was not there. Impressions were there, but there was no recognition.
That’s why Tantra calls this state non-memory. You see, but by seeing knowledge is not created. You don’t gather anything. You live moment to moment; you slip from one moment into another without carrying the first moment into the other. You don’t have any past, each moment arises absolutely fresh. That’s why children are so alive and so fresh, and their life is so full of joy, delight, wonder. Small things make them so happy, and small incidents make them so tremendously excited, ecstatic. They are continuously surprised: just a dog passing by and they are surprised. A cat comes in the room and they are surprised. You bring a flower, and the color is tremendous.... They live in the psychedelic world; everything is luminous. Their eyes are clear, no dust has gathered yet; their mirror reflects perfectly. This is the state of non-memory, the third state. And then comes the fourth state: memory, the state of mind. Adam has eaten the fruit of knowledge; he has fallen, he has come into the world. From no-mind to mind is the passage into the world. No-mind is nirvana; mind is samsara. If you want to go back again to that original purity, that primal innocence, that primordial purity of consciousness, then you will have to go backwards. And these same steps will be the steps: memory has to be dissolved into non-memory. Hence the insistence of all meditations that the mind has to be dropped, thoughts have to be dropped.
Move from thought to no-thought, then from no-thought to unorigination, and then from unorigination to no-mind...and the drop drops into the ocean. You are again the ocean, you are again the infinite, you are again the eternal.
No-mind is eternity; mind is time.
Now the other day I talked about four mudras: karma mudra, the action gesture, gyana mudra, the knowledge gesture, samaya mudra, the pure time gesture, and mahamudra, the great gesture, the space gesture. They are also connected with these four states.
The first, karma mudra, is memory. Tantra says: Whatsoever you think of as action is nothing but memory. In fact action has never happened. It is a dream that you have looked through, it is your projection. Action happens not, action cannot happen in the very nature of things. Action is just a mind-dream, you project it. So the first, karma mudra, is exactly parallel to memory. The day you drop memory, you go beyond action. Then too things happen through you, but you are no longer the actor, you are no longer the doer of them; the ego disappears. Things flow through you, but you are not the doer of them. The trees don’t try to grow; growth happens, but they are not trying to grow. Flowers bloom, but there is no effort involved. Rivers flow, but they are not tired. Stars move, but they are not worried. Things are happening, but there is no doer. The second state is gyana mudra, the knowing gesture. You simply watch, you simply know, you don’t do anything. Things happen, you are just a watcher; you don’t become identified as a doer. Then the third mudra is samaya mudra. Then by and by even the knower is not needed; there is nothing to know. First action disappears, then knowledge also disappears. Then there is pure now-ness; time just flows in its purity. All is: nothing has to be done and nothing has to be known. You are a simple being; time goes on flowing by the side, you are undisturbed, unperturbed. All desire to do or to know has disappeared. There are only two kinds of desires: the lower kind is to do something, the higher kind is to know something. The lower kind needs the body to do, the higher kind needs only the mind to know but both are desires. Both have gone, now you sit alone. Things move, time flows, everything goes on happening. You are neither a doer nor a knower.
And then the fourth gesture: the mahamudra, the great gesture. Even you are no more. Action dropped, knowledge dropped, then even time dropped...and then you also disappear. Then there is silence. This is what silence is. What you call silence is not silence. Your silence is just a faraway reflection, a very poor silence. Sometimes you feel a little relaxed and the mind is not spinning as fast as it does ordinarily; the mind is a little relaxed, you feel silence. That’s nothing.

Silence is when action has gone, knowledge has gone, time has disappeared...and you too. Finally you are gone. One day suddenly you find you are not: one day you suddenly find that everything has disappeared, nothing remains. In that nothingness the great gesture you are infinite.
With the first, karma mudra, there are thoughts and naturally, with thoughts, past and future, because thoughts are either of the past or they are of the future. With thoughts, the anxiety, tension, anguish. With the second, gyana mudra, memory dissolves into non-memory: no past, no future only now. Mind asleep, not dead yet, can wake up again. So many times gyana mudra happens and is lost. That is the meaning of gaining meditation and losing it. In the second case mind is not destroyed, it simply goes to sleep. It has a little sleep, that’s all; it goes into sleep. Then again it comes back, sometimes with a vengeance; comes back with tremendous energy, of course it has rested! So after each deep meditation you will find that the mind is spinning more, has got more energy now; it has been at rest and has become more active. In the second, gyana mudra, mind goes to sleep but has not disappeared yet but you can have a little taste of no-mind for a moment. For a split second the ray enters, you are thrilled. And the taste creates trust; this is where trust arises. Trust is not a belief, it is a taste. When you have seen this light, even for a single moment, then you can never be the same man again. You may lose it, but it will haunt you. You may not be able to get it again, but neither will you be able to forget it, it will always be there. And whenever you have time and energy, it will start knocking on your door.
This is the state that can happen in the presence of a master very easily; this is a contact-high. This second state, gyana mudra, can happen in the presence of a man who has attained to the fourth stage, to no-mind. Hence down the ages seekers have been searching for a master. Where to get the taste from? You cannot get it through books, books will only supply belief. Where to get a living experience from? And you cannot have that living experience because you don’t know what it is exactly, in what direction to move, what to do. And doubt is always there...whether it exists at all...maybe it is just the dream of a few mad people? And they are in a small minority a Buddha, a Christ, a Saraha, they are a very small portion of humanity. The great majority live without such experiences. Who knows, these people may be mad. Who knows, these people may have a certain perversion. Who knows, these people may be cheats, frauds; they may be deceiving others. Or maybe they are not cheats...honest people, but they are deceived themselves. They may have autohypnotized themselves, they may have created a hallucination. Or maybe they have dreamed it, maybe these are dreamers, and good dreamers.... There are good dreamers and bad dreamers. Bad dreamers are those whose dreams are always in black and white flat, two-dimensional. Good dreamers are those whose dreams are in three dimensions, always colorful. These three-dimensional dreamers become poets. Do you remember any time having a dream in color? Very rarely does a person see a dream in color; otherwise they are in black and white. If you see your dreams in color, then there is a possibility of your being a poet, a painter, otherwise not. Who knows, these mystics are great dreamers and they dream in three dimensions, so their dream looks absolutely actual. And naturally they devote so much time to their dreams that it is possible they may become obsessed with the dream and that nothing like this is really real....
This doubt persists, this doubt follows every seeker. It is natural, nothing to be worried about. How to drop this doubt? The scriptures simply say, ”Drop it and believe.” But how to drop it? You can believe, but deep down the doubt will continue.
Saint Augustine has a prayer which he used to pray every day to God: ”God, I believe. I absolutely believe. But take care, have mercy on me, so the doubt does not arise again.” But why? If the belief is absolute, then where does this fear arise from? Where does this prayer come from? ”I believe,” says Saint Augustine, ”and you take care of my unbelief.” But the unbelief is there. Maybe you have repressed it...out of greed, out of lust for God, out of lust and desire for the other world, you may have repressed it; but it is there, and it goes on gnawing at your heart. You cannot drop it unless some experience happens to you. But how can the experience happen? The scriptures say, unless you believe, the experience will not happen. Now this is a very complex phenomenon. They say that the experience will not happen unless you believe. And how can the experience happen? because you cannot believe until the experience happens. Only experience can create belief a belief without doubt, a doubtless trust.
This doubtless trust is possible only if you are in the presence of someone to whom it has happened. In the presence, someday, sitting silently, not knowing, not trying, not desiring, it happens. It happens like a flash of light...and your whole life is transformed. This is what is meant by conversion. You are converted, you are transformed, you have moved to a new plane.
The presence of somebody who lives higher than you has uplifted you. Unawares, in spite of yourself, you have been dragged. Once you have tasted, then there is trust. And when there is trust you can move into the third and the fourth. The presence of the master can lead you only to the second, gyana mudra. Yes, he can give you a little knowing, a little taste of his being.
When Jesus was departing, he broke the bread and said to his disciples, ”Eat it, it is me,” poured wine and said, ”Drink it, this is my blood, this is me.” This is very symbolic, it is a metaphor. This is gyana mudra. Jesus was saying: You can have a little taste of me, you can drink me, you can eat me. Each disciple is a cannibal. He eats of the master, he absorbs the master; that’s what eating means. What do you do when you eat something? You digest it, you absorb it. It becomes your blood, it becomes your bone, it becomes your marrow, it becomes your consciousness. That’s what eating is.
What do you do with a master? You eat his presence, you eat his vibe, and you digest it. And, by and by, it becomes your consciousness. The day it becomes your consciousness you are a sannyasin, not before it. Before it, sannyas is formal. Before it, sannyas is just a beginning towards this phenomenon. Without being a sannyasin it will be difficult for this to happen, because with sannyas you become open and vulnerable. When you are open and vulnerable, someday, in some moment, things fall together. In some moment your energy is in such a state that the master’s energy can pull it. In some moments you come very close. In some love moment, in some joy moment, in some celebration, you come close to the master, and you can be hooked! And just a glimpse, just a drop of that nectar goes down your throat, and you are converted.
Now you know. Now you know yourself, now there is no need to believe. Now even if the whole world says that God does not exist, it does not matter: you will be able to fight against the whole world because you know. How can you deny your own knowledge? How can you deny your own experience? That small drop is more powerful than the whole world.
That small drop is more potential than your whole past.
Millions of lives are nothing compared with that small drop.
But this can happen only when you are close. People come to me and they ask, ”Why sannyas? Can’t we be here without taking sannyas?” Yes, you can be here as long as you want, but you will not be close. You can sit exactly by my side. I can hold your hand; that will not do. Vulnerability on your part, openness on your part.... Just a few days ago a young man was asking me, ”What is the basic reason for the ochre robes, for the mala, for the locket? What is the rationale?”
”There is none,” I told him. ”It is just absurd.”
He was puzzled. He said, ”But if it is absurd, then why do you impose it?” And I told him, ”That’s precisely why.”
If I say something which is rational and you do it, that will not surrender you to me, that will not be the gesture. If something is rational and you are convinced of its rationality and then you follow it, then you are following your reason, not me. If something is rational and can be proved rationally, scientifically, and you follow it, you are not vulnerable to me, you are not available to me. That will not be of any use; you will still be following your reason. So each master down the ages has developed a few absurd things. They are simply symbolic. They simply show that, yes, you are ready and you are not asking for the reason. You are ready to go with this man and if he has some eccentric ideas, that too you allow. This loosens your head, it just makes you a little more open. Enlightenment can happen in any color; orange is not a must, it can happen in any color. It can happen without any locket, it can happen without any mala. But then why? ...The ’why’ is its absurdity. The reason is that it is meaningless. It is just a gesture on your part that you are ready to go into something even if it is absurd. You are ready to go beyond your reason, that’s the meaning of it.
This is a very small beginning, but small beginnings can end in big things. When the Ganges comes out of the Himalayas it is just a drip-drop; you can hold it in your hand, it is such a small phenomenon. But by the time it reaches the ocean it is so vast and so huge and so enormous that it will drown you; you cannot hold it anymore. This is a small gesture wearing orange and the mala and the locket a very absurd thing, a small gesture, the beginning of something. You love a man so much that you are ready to do something absurd for him, that’s all. This makes you vulnerable to me, and you can get the measles more easily then. Truth is infectious, and you have to be available to it. Doubt is a sort of inoculation: it protects. Reason protects. Protected, you will never move anywhere. Protected, you will die only. Protected, you are in your grave. Unprotected, you are available to God.
To be in close proximity to a master...the phenomenon can happen one day, you are uplifted; suddenly you have wings, a little taste of the freedom and the sky. And then...then things can be done on your own. Then the third becomes possible: samaya mudra. Then you can start looking in the direction which has opened within you, and you can start moving. Now you know where to move, where to go; now you have a certain intuitive grasp of it, now you know a certain knack. Religion is not a science, religion is not an art, it is a knack. But the knack comes through taste, through experience.
Samaya mudra is unorigination, parallel to unorigination: anutpanna. Then mind is not just asleep, mind has dropped. But with the second, mind will come back; it is only asleep. With the third, mind will not come back easily, but it is still possible to bring it back. With the second it will come back, it will happen; with gyana mudra it will come back on its own. With the third, samaya mudra, if you want to bring it back you can bring it back, but otherwise it won’t come on its own.
With the fourth, mahamudra, even if you want to bring it back, it is impossible. You have gone beyond, you have transcended. This fourth stage, which is the beginning of existence, is the goal of Tantra. Three things more, then we can enter into the sutra....
From memory to non-memory you will need ’awareness one’. You will have to become more watchful about the thoughts, dreams, memories flicking by, moving around you. You will have to have more attention focused on the thoughts. Thoughts are the objects and you will have to become aware of them. This is the first awareness: ’awareness one’. Krishnamurti talks about this. He calls it ’choiceless awareness’. Don’t choose. Whatsoever thought is passing by, don’t judge, just watch it; just see that it is moving. If you go on watching, one day thoughts don’t move that fast; their speed has slowed down. Then some day gaps start coming; one thought goes and another does not come for a long time. Then after some time thoughts simply disappear for hours, and the road is just empty of traffic.
Ordinarily you are always in a rush hour. Thoughts are jamming in, one thought upon another, track behind track. It is not only one track, there are many tracks going on. And the man you call a thinker has more tracks than the ordinary man. If you know anything about chess, then you know that the chess-player needs a five-track mind. He has to think at least about five moves ahead: if he is going to do this, then what will the other do? then what will he do? then what will the other do...? This way he has to go, at least five moves ahead. Unless he can hold these five moves in his mind he cannot be a great chess player. The people you call thinkers have a many-track mind, a very complex mind, and all the tracks are jammed. From every direction there is always a rush, and it is always rush-hour, even in the night. When you are asleep the mind goes on and on, it goes on working. It is a twenty-four-hour worker, it does not ask for any holiday. Even God got tired after six days and had to rest on Sunday, but mind needs no Sunday. For seventy, eighty years, it goes on working and working and working. It is maddening. No rest.... You must have seen a photograph of Rodin’s statue, The Thinker. In the East we laugh about the statue...so anxiety-ridden! Rodin’s Thinker...you can see his head even in the marble statue, you can feel his anxiety; that is Rodin’s art. You can think of how Aristotle would have been, or Bertrand Russell, or Friedrich Nietzsche and there is no surprise if Nietzsche goes mad. The way it is, this statue of Rodin is bound to go mad one day: thinking, thinking, thinking....
In the East we have not bothered much about thinkers, we have loved the nonthinkers. Buddha is a nonthinker, so is Mahavira, so is Saraha; these are nonthinkers. Even if they do think they think only to move towards nonthinking. They use thinking as a jumping board for nonthinking.
The bridge from memory to non-memory is ’awareness one’; it is awareness of the object. From non-memory to unorigination you will need a second awareness: that’s what Gurdjieff calls ’self-remembering’. Krishnamurti’s work is totally based on ’awareness one’; Gurdjieff’s work is totally based on ’awareness two’. With awareness one you look at the object, at the thought. You become attentive to the object. With ’awareness two’ you become doubly attentive to the object and the subject both. Your arrow of consciousness is doubleheaded. On the one side you have to become aware of the thought, and on the other side you have to become aware of the thinker: the object, subjectivity both have to be in the light of awareness. Gurdjieff’s work goes deeper than Krishnamurti’s. He calls it ’self-remembering’.
A thought is moving in your mind for example a cloud of anger is moving. You can watch the cloud of anger without watching the watcher, then this is ’awareness one’. If you watch the cloud and at the same time you continuously remember who is watching ’I am watching’ then this is ’awareness two’: what Gurdjieff calls ’self-remembering’.
From memory to non-memory awareness one will be helpful. But from non-memory you can very easily fall back again into memory, because mind only goes to sleep. With the first awareness you simply tranquilize the mind, you drug the mind; the mind goes into sleep. It is a great rest and a good beginning, but not the end; necessary, but not enough.

With the second awareness, the mind falls into unorigination, anutpanna: Now it will be very difficult to bring it back. You can bring it back, but it will not come on its own. It is not impossible to bring it back, but it is not easy.
With Gurdjieff the work goes still deeper. And Tantra says that there is a third awareness: ’awareness three’. What is this ’awareness three’? When you forget about the object and you forget about the subject and there is just pure awareness. You are not focused on anything just a hovering pure awareness, not attentive about anything, just attentive, unfocused, unconcentrated. With the first you are concentrated on the object. With the second you are concentrated on the object and the subject too. With the third you drop all concentration, you are simply alert. This third leads you to the state of no-mind.
Now the sutras:
Non-memory is convention’s truth and mind which has become no-mind is ultimate truth. Tantra divides truth in two ways: the first it calls hypothetical truth, vyavharika; the second it calls ultimate truth, parmarthika. Hypothetical truth is called truth only for the name’s sake, it is called truth because it looks like truth. It is so just in practice; it has a certain glimpse of the truth. It is almost like this: if somebody shows you a picture of me and you say, ”Yes, it is a true picture,” what do you mean by a ’true picture’? How can the picture be true? The statement that the picture is true simply means that it resembles the original. The picture in itself is untrue all pictures are untrue, it is just a paper. How can I be on the paper, how can I be the paper, how can I be the lines? Even a true photograph is just a photograph. But by saying, ”It is a true photograph,” we say that, yes, it resembles the original. I have heard one anecdote....
A very beautiful but talkative woman once came to see Pablo Picasso, and she talked too much. Pablo Picasso was bored, but she was very rich so he could not throw her out either. She was a great customer of his paintings, so he had to listen. And she was going on and on and on.
Then finally she said, ”Just the other day I saw your photograph in a friend’s house. It was so alive and I loved it so much that I kissed it.”
Picasso said, ”Wait! Did it kiss back?”
The woman said, ”What are you saying? Have you gone mad? How can a picture kiss back?” Picasso said, ”Then it was not me. It was certainly not me!”
A picture is true because it resembles. It is untrue because it is a picture. This is what Tantra calls vyavharika truth. Non-memory is convention’s truth...it is just so-so, it is just called truth conventionally. Memory you know; non-memory happens sometimes in the presence of a master, or while meditating or praying. But even non-memory is just a hypothetical truth; it is a photograph. Yes, it resembles the true no-mind, but only in resemblance. It is not yet the true no-mind.
To make you aware of it and to keep it in your mind, Tantra insists again and again that this has not to be taken as the goal; it is just the beginning. Many people become stuck when they attain to non-memory. When they can have a few glimpses of no-mind, they think they have arrived. It is tremendously beautiful, it is very alive; in comparison to memory it is ecstatic. But it is nothing in comparison to the real no-mind state, because memory is still there, fast asleep, snoring; it can wake at any moment. Mind is still there waiting for its opportunity to come back. Yes, the traffic has stopped for a moment, but the traffic will start again. It is good to have these glimpses because they will lead you further, but it is not good to get stuck. This is what happens through drugs LSD, marijuana, mescaline this is what happens, this second state, non-memory. For a moment, under the impact of the drug, memory disappears. It is a chemically-enforced state; in chemical shock, memory disappears.
This is what happens through electroshock. We give electroshock to mad people whose memories have become such a burden to them that they cannot get out of it by themselves. We give them electroshock or insulin shock. Why? because through the shock electricity passing through their brainwaves, giving them such a shock for a moment they become uprooted. They lose track, they forget what they were thinking, what was there. For a moment they are dazzled by the shock and when they come back they cannot recapture it. That’s why electroshock helps. But electroshock or chemical shocks don’t give you the real thing, they give you only a photograph. Non-memory is convention’s truth and mind which has become no-mind is the ultimate truth. So don’t be contented unless you attain to no-mind, the fourth state. This is fulfillment, says Saraha, this is the highest good. Friends, of this highest good become aware. This no-mind is fulfilment, because you have arrived at the very source of life and existence. And unless it happens, there is no contentment and no fulfillment. This is real flowering, this is sahasrar: the one-thousandpetaled lotus has bloomed. Your life is released in fragrance and celebration and joy.

This is what God is. This is the highest good, the summum bonum. There is nothing higher than this. This is nirvana.
Friends, of this highest good, become aware, Saraha says. Remember, there are three kinds of awareness: ’awareness one’ of the object, ’awareness two’ of the object and the subject, ’awareness three’, pure awareness. Go into these three stages of awareness so that you can attain the summum bonum. And he says to the king and to the others who must have gathered to listen to this great discourse: ”Friends....” He calls them friends; this has to be understood. From the side of the master the disciple is the friend, but not from the side of the disciple. Sometimes a few sannyasins write to me; just the other day there was a question.... One sannyasin had written, ”Osho, I cannot think of you as my master, but I think of you as my friend. Is there something wrong in it?” Nothing from my side, it is perfectly okay. But something is missing from your side and you will be at a loss. Why is it so?
From the side of the master you are friends, because he can see that it is only a question of time; otherwise you have already arrived. It is only a question of time and one day you will become awake. You are all buddhas! From the side of the master the whole existence is already enlightened. The rocks and the trees and the stars and the animals and the birds and men and women the whole existence is enlightened from the side of the master. It is only a question of time, and time is irrelevant. You are all there. You don’t know it, that is true, but the master knows.
The day I knew my own self, I knew the very self of existence. Since then I have not looked at anybody as unenlightened; I cannot, that is impossible. Yes, you don’t recognize your fact, but I cannot deny it. From my side you are friends; you are me. But from your side, if you think that you cannot accept me as your master and you can only think about me as a friend, then it is up to you. But know that you will miss. What is the difference? When you accept a person as a friend, you mean that you accept him as your equal; a friend is equal to you. Yes, you are friends to me because I see that you are just equal to me, there is no difference. But if you see me as an equal to you, then your growth will stop.
When I see you as equal to me, I am raising you to my being. When you see me as equal to you, you are pulling me down to your level. Just see the difference. When I say that you are equal to me I am trying to pull you to me. When you say, ”Osho, you are equal to us,” you pull me to your level. Naturally you cannot pull anywhere else, you don’t know any other level. And why is it difficult to accept somebody as your master? The ego...at most the ego wants you to accept me as the friend.
It is up to you, it is your choice. If that is the way you want it to be, let it be that way but then I am not responsible if nothing happens to you. Then it is your responsibility, utterly your responsibility, if nothing happens to you, because you have created the barrier. I can flow towards you only when you look upwards at me, because the flow of energy is possible only downwards.
I am not losing anything if you think of me as your friend, I am not losing anything even if you think of me as your enemy that doesn’t matter. You will be losing. The man who thinks that I am his enemy and the man who thinks that I am his friend, both think of me in the same way. The man who thinks I am his enemy is making me equal to him, and the man who thinks I am his friend is doing the same. They are not different people. When you look upwards you can be hooked by the upward energy, you can be pulled.

Saraha says:
Friends, of this highest good, become aware. From the master’s side everybody is a friend. Those who think they are friends, they are friends; and those who think they are enemies, they also are friends. In non-memory is mind absorbed; just this is emotionality perfect and pure. It is unpolluted by the good or bad of worldliness like a lotus unaffected by the mud from which it grows. In non-memory is mind absorbed.... Memory watched is absorbed into non-memory. In non-memory mind starts disappearing. And when the mind starts disappearing, there arises a new kind, a new quality of energy in you the heart energy. Just this is emotionality perfect and pure. Then the heart starts functioning. When the mind is dissolved, the energy that was involved in the mind becomes love. It has to become something energy cannot be destroyed. No energy is ever destroyed, it is only transformed; it changes its form. Mind is taking almost eighty percent of your energy, giving you back nothing, returning nothing; it just goes on absorbing eighty percent of your energy. It is like a desert. The river goes on flowing and the desert goes on absorbing it, and nothing comes back. And the desert does not even become green, does not even grow grass, does not even grow trees, does not even become a small pool of water nothing! It remains dry and dead, and it goes on soaking up the life energy. Mind is a great exploiter. That is where, in the desert of the mind, in the wasteland of the mind, you are lost.

Saraha says: When this happens that the memory is dissolved and you attain to non-memory suddenly your total quality changes. You become more loving: compassion arises in you. The same energy that was going into the desert moves into a fertile land. The heart is the land of fertility. ...just this is emotionality perfect and pure. It is unpolluted by the good or bad of worldliness... And in the heart there is no distinction between good and bad. The heart knows no distinctions; all distinctions belong to the mind. The heart simply loves without any distinctions. The heart simply flows without any categories, without any judgment. The heart is innocent: It is unpolluted by the good or bad...like a lotus unaffected by the mud from which it grows.
It grows from the same mind energy, from the same mud of thoughts, thinking, desire, lust, but it is a lotus. It grows out of the mud, but remains unpolluted by the mud.
Yet with certainty must all things be viewed as if they were a magic spell.... If without distinction you can accept or reject samsara or nirvana, steadfast is your mind, free from the shroud of darkness. In you will be self-being, beyond thought and self-originated...
...Saraha says to the king. A great technique he is giving to him! Listen to it, meditate over it and try it. You know well that you have dreamed millions of dreams but in the dream, again and again you forget that it is a dream; again it becomes reality. Tonight you are going to dream again. What kind of unconsciousness is this? Each night you dream and in the morning you find it was false; it was not there, it was just images, just imagination. Again you are a victim. Again you dream and again you think that this is real. Why can’t you see that it is unreal in the dream? What prevents you from seeing? So much experience of so many dreams and so many conclusions, and all without exception proving one thing, that dreams are not true. Again tonight you will be a victim; the dream will be there and you will think that it is true, you will live it as if it were true. Tantra develops a technique. The technique is: while you are awake, think of the world as a dream. For example, right now you are listening to me think of it as a dream. It is easy to think it right now, rather than while in a dream. Many times you will listen to me in your dreams, then it will be too difficult; you will be fast asleep. Right now it can be done more easily. Right now you can think that you are in a dream: Osho is your dream, he is talking in your dream, these trees are dream trees, these gulmohar flowers are dream flowers, these birds are singing in your dream all is just a magic spell. Think it while you are awake. Continue thinking it for at least two or three months and you will be surprised: one day, because you have practiced it, suddenly in the dream you will recognize it as a dream. And when the real trees also look like dream through practice, what to say about unreal trees? They will look unreal.
And Tantra says: Even these trees are basically just dream; they are not real stuff. What does Tantra mean by reality? Tantra means that which remains always and always. That which comes and goes is unreal. That which is born and dies is unreal. This is the definition of unreality in Tantra: that which is momentary is unreal, that which is eternal is real.
These trees were not here a few days ago and they will not be here after a few years. We were not here a few years ago and we will not be here after a few years. So it is a long dream. In the night the dream persists for only one, two, or six hours, and this dream persists for sixty years or seventy years. But just the duration of time cannot make much difference. Whether a dream is of one hour or one hundred years does not make much difference, the difference is only of duration but it disappears.
How many people have lived on the earth, do you know? Where are they? If they had not existed, what difference would it have made? Whether they existed or not does not make much difference; they have all disappeared. That which appears and disappears is the dream.
Saraha says:
Yet with certainty must all things be viewed as if they were a magic spell.... He is giving a technique. View everything as if it were a magic spell, as if a magician has hypnotized you; all is false, and you are seeing it through hypnosis.
If without distinction you can accept or reject samsara or nirvana... If it is just a dream then there is nothing to accept and reject. Then who bothers? You bother too much because you think it is real. Whether you are poor or rich does not make much difference. Whether you are beautiful or ugly does not make much difference. Whether you are respected or not does not make much difference. If it is just unreal, a dream world, a maya, then what is there to choose? and what is there to reject? Then acceptance and rejection both drop. Then one lives purely, without entanglements, without disturbances, without in any way going off-center. Then one settles, then everything is okay.
If without distinction you can accept or reject samsara or nirvana, steadfast is your mind...

Then whether you accept or reject does not make much difference. Then you can renounce the world or you can live in the world. If you know this much that all is just a dream; if you remain in this climate that all is a dream....
Why is Saraha saying this to the king? Saraha is saying: Sir, you live in the palace, I live in the cemetery; you live with beautiful people, I live with ordinary, ugly people; you live in richness, I live in poverty; you live in the capital, I live here at the cremation ground...but it is all the same. That palace is a dream and this cremation ground is a dream. Your beautiful queen is a dream and my arrowsmith woman is a dream. So what is the difference?
If in the dream you become rich or you become poor, is there any difference in the morning? Do you feel very happy in the morning because you have been very rich in the dream? Do you feel very unhappy in the morning because you have been a beggar in the dream? It does not matter; when you are awake, it does not matter. Saraha says: Sir, I am awake. The third consciousness has happened; to me all is dream dream and all. To me all is dream ...dream within dream within dream. Now I don’t make any distinction, I have gone beyond distinctions. No-mind has arisen. So whether people respect me or insult me whether they think Saraha is a great brahmin, a great mystic, a great knower, or they think that he is a pervert, that he is mad, crazy, insane it is perfectly okay.
This is true understanding. Then nobody’s opinion can distract you. Then nothing can distract you neither success nor failure, neither respect nor humiliation, neither life nor death. This is what the state of no-distraction is. One has come home.
Then, once mind is steadfast...free from the shroud of darkness. In you will be self-being.... I have come home, says Saraha. My self-being has arisen, I have my center now. I have lost everything, except for one thing: my self-nature, my self-being. Now I know my origin, now I know my very source, now I know my reality. ...beyond thought and self-originated.
I have moved beyond thought. These things don’t distract me, sir. Everything is okay as it is. This is the attitude of a real sannyasin: all is perfectly okay as it is.
The last sutra:
This world of appearance has from its radiant beginning never come to be; unpatterned, it has discarded patterning. As such it is continuous and unique meditation; it is non-mentation, stainless contemplation, and no-mind.
This world of appearance has from its radiant beginning never come to be.... Says Saraha: This world that you are seeing has never been there; it only appears so. Just as a dream arises from nowhere and disappears back into nowhereness, so is this world.
This world of appearance has from its radiant beginning never come to be.... From the very beginning nothing is just a ripple on the silent lake...and the ripple disappears. And you cannot catch hold of a ripple...just like a thought wave, just like a vibration. ...unpatterned, it has discarded patterning. And there is no pattern in it. It is not solid how can it have any pattern? It is very liquid, it is very fluid; it has no pattern. Nobody knows what is good and what is bad. Nobody knows who is a saint and who is a sinner. Nobody knows what is virtue and what is sin. It is not patterned.
This is the Tantra understanding of the very core of reality: it is unpatterned. It is a creative chaos. Ultimately, finally, nothing has to be condemned and nothing has to be appreciated. ...unpatterned, it has discarded patterning. As such it is continuous and unique meditation... This is a beautiful sutra. Saraha says: But forget about its reality-unreality As such it is continuous and unique meditation.... This existence all around...these trees, these birds, this cuckoo going mad it is continuous and unique meditation. If you can become aware of it, it can help you come home; it is continuous and unique meditation.
...it is non-mentation...
Don’t bring your mind in. Just listen to it, see it, touch it. Don’t bring your mind in. ...it is non-mentation, stainless contemplation...
Contemplate, but not through thoughts, just through transparency. Watch, look, be not through analysis, not through logic. Relate through silence; that is stainless contemplation. Relate through silence, relate through love. Relate...relate to this cuckoo, relate to the trees, to the sun, but don’t think about them. Don’t become a thinker...
...and no-mind.

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