An ox’s footprints filled with water Will soon dry up

An ox’s footprints filled with water Will soon dry up; so with a mind that’s firm But full of qualities that are not perfect, These imperfections will in time dry up.
What are you keeping in your small skull? What are the contents? Desires, dreams, ambitions, thoughts, imagination, will, emotions these are the things that you are keeping as content. They all will dry up, all contents will dry up. So change the emphasis from the contents to the container; that is the whole secret of Tantra. Look at the container and don’t look at the content. The sky is full of clouds; don’t look at the clouds, look at the sky. Don’t look at what is there in your head, what is there in your mind; just look at your consciousness. Emotion is there, anger is there, love is there, greed is there, fear is there, jealousy is there these are contents. Just behind them is the infinite sky of consciousness.

A man who lives through the contents lives the life of a machine. And the man who starts changing his emphasis from the contents to the container starts living the life of awareness, of buddhahood. And says Saraha: Sir, these contents that you are having in your mind will soon dry up. Look at that ox’s footprint! Your head is not bigger than that, the skull is not bigger than that. But your consciousness is infinite. Now this has to be understood: emotions are in your head, but consciousness is not in your head. In fact your head is in your consciousness! Consciousness is vast, infinite. Emotions, desires, ambitions, are in your head; they will dry up. But even when your head has completely dropped and disappeared into the earth, your consciousness will not disappear. You don’t contain the consciousness in you; the consciousness contains you, it is bigger than you.
There are people who ask...sometimes somebody comes to me and asks: ”Where is the soul in the human body? In the heart? In the navel? In the head? Where is the soul?” They think they are asking a very pertinent question. It is nowhere in the body: your body is in the soul. The soul is a bigger phenomenon than your body, the soul surrounds you.
And your soul and my soul are not different! We live in the existence, we live in one soul’s ocean. One soul surrounds us, within and without. It is all one energy; I don’t have a different soul and you don’t have a different soul. We have different bodies. It is almost like the electricity running into the bulb and running into the radio and running into the TV and moving the fan, and doing a thousand and one things. The fan is different from the bulb, but the electricity that runs them is the same.

We are one energy. Our expressions are different, but our reality is one. If you look at the content, if I look at the content, then my dreams are different from yours certainly. We cannot share our dreams. I have my ambitions, you have your ambitions. And it is not only that we cannot share our dreams: our dreams are in conflict. My ambition is against your ambition; your ambition is against my ambition. But if we forget the contents and just look at consciousness, pure consciousness, cloudless sky, then where are ’you’ and where am ’I’? We are one. In that moment there is unity. And in that moment there is universal consciousness. All consciousness is universal. Unconsciousness is private, consciousness is universal. The day you become really a man, you are a universal man. That is the meaning of ’christ’: universal man, son of God. That is the meaning of ’buddha’: universal man come to total and absolute awareness. Man as a machine is different...this has to be understood. If you are having kidney trouble, I am not having; if I am having a headache, you are not having the headache; even if you love me you cannot share the headache. Even if I love you I cannot have your pain. But if we two are sitting together and meditating and a moment comes when I have no content in my mind and you also don’t have any content in your mind, we will not be two. Meditators begin as separate, but end as one.
If you all are sitting in meditation here, listening to me, then you are not many, then you are one. Then you are not only one: the speaker and the listener are not separate, then we are bridged together. Twenty meditators in a room meditating, when they come to real meditation, are no longer twenty: there is only one meditative quality in the room.
There is a story....

A few people came to see Buddha. Ananda was sitting on guard outside the room, but those people took such a long time that Ananda became worried. Many times he looked in, but they continued and continued and continued.... Then he came inside the room to see what was happening. And there he found nobody, just Buddha sitting. So he asked Buddha, ”Where have those fellows gone? And there is no other door...and I am sitting at the only door, so where have they gone?”
And Buddha said, ”They are meditating.”

It is a beautiful story. They all fell into meditation, and Ananda could not see them because he was still not a meditator. He could not see this new phenomenon, this total shift of energy. They were not there, because they were not as their bodies there, they were not as their minds there. Those egos dissolved. Ananda could see only what he could see. A new reality had happened.

A great king once came to see Buddha. His prime minister persuaded him to come, but he was a very suspicious man, as politicians and kings usually are, very suspicious. He didn’t want to come in the first place.... Just for political reasons he came to see him because in the capital the rumor was spreading that he was against Buddha; and all the people were for Buddha, so he became afraid, it was not diplomatic. So he went to see with his prime minister.

When he reached closer to the grove where Buddha was sitting with his ten thousand monks, he became very much afraid. He pulled his sword out and he said to the prime minister, ”What is the matter? because you said ten thousand people are staying there, and we have come so close and there is no noise! Is there some conspiracy?” The prime minister laughed and said, ”You don’t know Buddha’s people. Just put your sword back! You come on there is no conspiracy or anything. You need not be afraid, they are not going to kill you. You don’t know Buddha’s men.”

But very suspicious, holding his hand on the sword, the king went into the grove. He was surprised. He could not believe there were ten thousand people sitting under the trees silently, as if there was no one. He asked Buddha, ”This is a miracle! ten thousand people...even ten people together create so much noise! What are these people doing? What has happened to these people, has something gone wrong? Are they still alive? they look like statues! And what are they doing sitting here? They should do something!” And Buddha said, ”They are doing something, but it has nothing to do with the outside. They are doing something in their inner world. They are not in their bodies, they are in their beings, at the very core. And these are not ten thousand people right now, they are all part of one consciousness.”

The third sutra:
Like salt sea water that turns sweet When drunk up by the clouds, So a firm mind that works for others turns The poison of sense-objects into nectar.
The basic Tantra attitude is: The sensual can be transformed into the sublime, matter can be transformed into mind, the unconscious can be transformed into consciousness.
Modern physics says matter can be transformed into energy, energy can be transformed into matter. In fact they are not two but the same energy functioning as two forms. Tantra says sex can be transformed into samadhi the same approach, very basic and fundamental. The lower can be transformed into the higher, because lower and higher are joined together; it is a ladder. They are never separate, nowhere separate, there is no gap between them. You can move from the lower to the higher, you can move from the higher to the lower. And that ladder is what man is. He can exist on the lowest rung; that is his decision. He can move upwards, he can exist on the highest rung. He can exist as a beast or he can exist as a buddha: both are his rungs, the lowest and the highest. And man is a ladder: he can fall into deep unconsciousness and become a rock, and he can rise to absolute consciousness and can become a god. But they are not separate, that is the beauty of Tantra. Tantra is non-divisive, Tantra is the only religion which is not schizophrenic. Tantra is the only religion which is really sane, the sanest religion, because it doesn’t divide.

If you divide you create a split. If you tell people that the body is bad, that the body is the enemy, that the body has to be condemned, that the body is in the service of the devil, then you are creating a split in man, then the man becomes afraid of the body. And then by and by there is created an unbridgeable gulf and he is pulled into two parts, he is torn in two opposite directions. The body pulls the body in two, the mind tries to pull the mind in two ; there is a conflict and confusion. Tantra says you are one, there is no need to have any confusion. You can be fused in one reality. There is no need to have any conflict, there is no need to be torn apart, there is no need to go insane. You can love all that is available, and you can evolve it with deep love, care, creativity, it can be evolved. The body is not the enemy of your soul, the body is just the sheath of your sword. The body is just the temple, it is your abode. It is not the enemy, it is your friend.
Tantra drops all sorts of violence, not only violence with others but violence with oneself. Tantra says: Love reality in its totality. Yes, much can be evolved, but all evolution is through love. And there is no need to fight. Like salt sea water that turns sweet When drunk up by the clouds....

You cannot drink the salt sea water, it is so salty; it is all salt. You will die if you drink the salty sea water. But when a cloud comes and draws the water from the sea, it turns sweet, and then you can drink it. Saraha says: Samadhi is like a cloud, meditative energy is like a cloud which turns your sexuality into higher realms, which turns your physical existence into non-physical existence, which turns the salty, bitter experiences of the world into sweet, nectarlike experiences of nirvana. The samsara itself becomes nirvana if you can create the cloud that transforms it. That cloud Buddha has actually called dharmamegha samadhi, the samadhi of the cloud of the fundamental law dharmamegha samadhi.
You can create that cloud. That cloud is created by meditation. You go on intensely meditating, dropping thoughts, dropping desires, ambitions...by and by your consciousness is a burning fire that cloud is there. Now you can transform anything through that fire; that fire transmutes, that fire is alchemical. Through meditation the lower becomes higher, the baser metal is turned into gold.

Like salt sea water that turns sweet When drunk up by the clouds, So a firm mind that works for others Turns the poison of sense-objects into nectar.
Two things: first, one has to create a cloud of meditation in one’s being; and the second thing is compassion one who works for others. Buddha insists on two things: meditation and compassion, pragyan and karuna. He says that sometimes it happens that a meditator can become too much selfish; then too something goes sour. Meditate, delight, but share the delight, go on sharing it. Don’t hoard it, because once you start hoarding, ego starts arising. Never hoard anything. The moment you get it, give it, and you will be getting more and more and more. The more you give, the more you get. Then everything becomes nectar. Everything is nectar; we just have to know how to turn it, we have to know the alchemy.

The last sutra:
If ineffable, never is one unsatisfied, If unimaginable, it must be bliss itself. Though from a cloud one fears the thunderclap, The crops ripen when from it pours the rain. The ineffable...Saraha says: Don’t ask me what it is it is ineffable, it cannot be said. It cannot be expressed, no language exists which can express it. But it can be experienced. Look at my contentment! Look how satisfied I have become! You have known me before too, how restless I was, how unsatisfied with everything. And all was available; I was your favorite, all was available to me, yet I was not satisfied. Now, look! I am standing in a cemetery ground, not even a roof over my head! And I don’t live with kings and queens, I am living with this arrowsmith woman. But look into my eyes...how contented I am. Can’t you see something ineffable has happened? Can’t you feel my vibe? Are you so dull and dead that you need explanations?

If ineffable, never is one unsatisfied...
That is the only criterion whether a man has attained to truth or not: he will never be unsatisfied, his contentment is absolute. You cannot drag him out of his contentment, you cannot make him discontented; whatsoever happens, he remains the same, contented. Success or failure, life or death, friends or no friends, lovers or no lovers, it makes no difference. His tranquility, his stillness is utterly absolute. He is centered...If ineffable, never is one unsatisfied.
If that which cannot be said has happened, then there is only one way to know it, and that way is to see the contentment.
If unimaginable, it must be bliss itself.

And I know, he says: You cannot imagine what has happened to me. How can you imagine? because you have never known it. Imagination is always repeating the same that you have known. You can imagine happiness; you have known bits and pieces of it. You can imagine unhappiness; you have known it, a lot of it. You can imagine happiness even if you don’t know happiness; you can imagine it as the contrary of unhappiness. But how can you imagine bliss? You have not known it. And there is nothing as contrary to it, it is not a duality. It is impossible to imagine.

So Saraha says: I can understand...you cannot imagine it, but I am not saying to imagine it. Look! It is present herenow. And if you cannot imagine it, that also is one of the criterions of truth: truth cannot be imagined. It can be seen, but not imagined. You can have a vision of it, but you cannot dream about it. And that is the difference between a dream and a vision.

Dream is yours. Vision is not yours.
Christ saw God, and the scriptures say he saw the vision. Now the psychoanalyst will say it was just a dream; he does not know the difference between a dream and a vision. A dream is yours: you were imagining, you created it, it was your fantasy. A vision is something out of the blue that you have never thought about, not even a part of it has ever been thought by you. It is so utterly new...then it is a vision. Vision is from God, dream is from your mind. If unimaginable, it must be bliss itself....
Look at me you cannot imagine what has happened. Can’t you see it? You have eyes to see look, watch, hold my hand! Come closer to me, just be vulnerable to me, so my vibration can vibrate your being, and the unimaginable and the ineffable can be experienced.
Though from a cloud one fears the thunderclap...

And Saraha says: I know.... He must have seen the king a little afraid. I see it every day. People come to me and I see them trembling, afraid, fearful, and they say, ”We are afraid, Osho.” I know! Saraha must have seen the king was trembling deep inside...maybe not on the outside. He was a great king, a very disciplined man he must have been, he must have been standing erect but deep down he must have been afraid. It always happens when you are close by a Saraha-like man, or a Buddha-like man, you are bound to be afraid. Just the other night a young man came and he said, ”But why am I afraid of you? You have not done anything wrong to me why am I afraid of you? I love you certainly, but why am I afraid of you?” It is natural. When you come close to an abyss, what do you expect? you will be afraid. There is every possibility you may fall into it and will not be able to recover yourself again; it is going to be irrevocable, irrecoverable. You will be completely, utterly gone in it. You will not be able to recapitulate. Fear is natural. Saraha says: Though from a cloud one fears the thunderclap.... He says: I am like a cloud and you are afraid because of the thunderclap, of the lightning. But remember, The crops ripen when from it pours the rain. If you allow me to rain on you, the seeds will sprout, sir, and the man that is still hidden behind you, still not yet born, will be born. You will be able to ripen, to mature, you will be able to blossom. I invite you, says Saraha, for a great harvest...the harvest of consciousness, the harvest of awareness. Enough for today.

I am a destroyer

The first question:
Osho, I have taken lately to daydreaming about enlightenment even more delicious than love and fame. Have you any comment to make about daydreaming?
The question is from Prem Pankaja. Daydreaming is perfectly okay as far as love and fame are concerned. They are part of a dream world, you can dream as much as you like. Love is a dream, so is fame; they are not against dreaming. In fact, when dreaming stops they disappear. They exist in the same dimension, the dimension of dream.

But you cannot dream about enlightenment. Enlightenment is possible only when dreaming disappears. Enlightenment is absence of dreaming, day or night, that doesn’t matter. Enlightenment means now your consciousness is fully aware; in an aware consciousness dreaming cannot exist. Dreaming is like darkness, it exists when the light is not there. When the light is there, darkness simply cannot exist. Dreaming exists because life is dark, dim, dismal. Dreaming exists as a substitute: because we don’t have real joy, hence we dream. Because we don’t really have anything in life, hence we dream. Otherwise how will we be able to tolerate the emptiness that we are, how will we be able to tolerate our existence? It will be absolutely unbearable. Dreams make it bearable, dreams help us. They say to us, ”Wait! Today things are not going right? Don’t be worried, tomorrow everything will be put right. Everything has to be right. We will try maybe we have not tried enough yet. Maybe we have not worked in the right direction. Maybe fate was not with us, God was against us, but it cannot be forever....” And God is compassionate, kind; all the religions of the world say God is very kind, very compassionate. It is a hope.
Mohammedans continuously repeat: God is rahim, rahman compassionate, kind. Why? For what do they repeat this again and again? Each time they utter the word God they will repeat ’the compassionate, the kind’. Why? If he is not kind, then where will our hope and dreaming exist? He has to be kind for our dreams to exist, because there exists our hope in his kindness, in his compassion. Tomorrow things will be okay, tomorrow they are going to be okay.

Daydreaming is good as far as love and fame are concerned, as far as outgoing energies are concerned, because outgoing, we are going in a dream. The world is a dream phenomenon; that is what Hindus mean when they call it maya, illusion. It is made of the same stuff dreams are made of. It is a daydream seen with open eyes. But enlightenment is a totally different plane of being. Dreams don’t exist there. And if you continue to dream, enlightenment will not be possible.
I was reading just the other day a beautiful anecdote....

A parson had a parrot, but despite all efforts to try and teach it to speak the bird remained dumb. The parson mentioned this one day to an elderly lady parishioner who visited him. She was interested and said, ”I also have a parrot which does not speak. It might be a good idea to put the two birds together and see what happens.” Well this they did, the parrots being put in a large cage while the parson and his lady parishioner withdrew out of sight but not out of hearing. At first all was quiet, then came some fluttering and the old lady’s parrot was heard to exclaim, ”What about a spot of love, deary?” To which the parson’s parrot replied, ”That’s what I have been silently praying and waiting for for years. Today my dream is fulfilled, I can speak today.” If you are waiting and praying and dreaming for love and fame, it will happen one day! It is not a difficult phenomenon. One just needs stubbornness, and it happens. One just needs to go on and on and on...it is bound to happen, because it is your dream. You will find some place or other where you can project it and you can see it, almost as if it has become a reality.

When you fall in love with a woman or a man, what are you doing exactly? You were carrying a dream inside you; now suddenly the woman functions as a screen, you project your dream on her. You start feeling ”My dream is fulfilled.” The woman projects her dream on you; you function as a screen, and she feels her dream is fulfilled. If you go on dreaming some day or other you will find a screen, somebody will become a screen, and your dream will be fulfilled.
But enlightenment is not a dream, it is a dropping of all dreams. So please don’t dream about enlightenment. Love is possible through dreaming; in fact it is possible only through dreaming. Fame is possible through dreaming in fact it is only possible through dreaming, it happens only to dreamers. But enlightenment is not possible through dreaming; the very existence of dreaming will make it impossible.

Dream for it and you will miss. Wait for it and you will miss. Hope for it and you will miss. Then what are you supposed to do? What you are supposed to do is to understand the mechanism of dreaming. You can leave enlightenment aside, it is none of your business. You just look deep into the faculty of dreaming, understand how dreaming functions; that very understanding will bring a clarity. In that clarity dreaming stops, disappears. When dreaming is not, enlightenment is. Forget about enlightenment! You are not to even think about it. How can you think about it? And whatsoever you think is going to be wrong. How can you hope for it? All hopes about it are going to be wrong. How can you desire it? It cannot be desired. Then what are we supposed to do? Try to understand desiring. Try to understand hoping. Try to understand dreaming. That’s what is needed. You simply try to understand how your mind has been functioning up to now. Seeing into the functioning of the mind, mind disappears. Just a good look into the inner mechanism of the mind, and suddenly it comes to a halt. In that halt there is enlightenment. In that halt there is a taste of a totally new dimension of existence. Dreaming is one dimension, existence is another dimension. Existence is. Dreaming is simply a belief.

The second question:
Osho, You spoke in several recent discourses on the no-problem, the nonexistence of our problems. Having been brought up in a repressive Catholic family, and having spent twenty-one years in an equally crazy educational system...are you saying that all the coats of armor, all the conditionings and all the repressions do not exist, can be dropped immediately NOW? What about all the imprints left on the brain, on the musculature of the body?

This is a very significant question. It is from Jayananda. The question is significant because it shows two different approaches concerning the inner reality of man. The Western approach is to think about the problem, to find the causes of the problem, to go into the history of the problem, into the past of the problem, to uproot the problem from the very beginning, to uncondition the mind, or to recondition the mind, to recondition the body, to take out all those imprints that have been left on the brain this is the Western approach. Psychoanalysis goes into the memory, it works there. It goes into your childhood, into your past, it moves backwards: it finds out from where the problem has arisen. Maybe fifty years before, when you were a child, the problem arose in your relationship with your mother...then psychoanalysis will go back.
Fifty years of history! It is a very long, dragging affair. And even then it doesn’t help much because there are millions of problems, it is not only a question of one problem. You can go into one problem’s history, you can look into your autobiography and find out the causes. Maybe you can eliminate one problem, but there are millions of problems. If you start going into each problem, to solve one life’s problems you will need millions of lives. Let me repeat it: to solve one life’s problems you will have to be born again and again, millions of times. This is most impractical, this cannot be done. And all those millions of lives when you will be solving the problems of this life, those lives will create their own problems...and so on and so forth. You will be dragged more and more into the problems...this is absurd!

Now the same psychoanalytical approach has gone into the body: rolfing, bio-energetics and other methods are there which try to eliminate imprints on the body, in the musculature. Again you have to go into the history of the body. But one thing is certain about both the approaches, which are on the same logical pattern: that the problem comes from the past, so somehow it has to be tackled in the past.

Man’s mind has always been trying to do two impossible things. One is, to reform the past which cannot be done. The past has happened, you cannot really go into the past. When you think of going into the past, at the most you go into the memory of it; it is not the real past, it is just the memory. The past is no longer there, so you cannot reform it. This is one of the impossible goals of humanity; man has suffered very much because of it: you want to undo the past. How can you undo it? The past is absolute. The past means: all potentiality of it is finished, it has become actual. Now there is no longer any potentiality to reform it, to undo it, to redo it. You cannot do anything with the past.
And the second impossible idea that has always dominated the human mind is: to establish the future, which cannot be done again. Future means that which is not yet, you cannot establish it; future remains unestablished, future remains open. Future is pure potentiality! Unless it happens, you cannot be certain about it. Past is pure actuality, it has happened. Now nothing can be done about it.

Between these two man stands in the present, always thinking of the impossibles. He wants to make everything certain about the future, about tomorrow which cannot be done. Let it sink as deeply in your heart as possible: it cannot be done. Don’t waste your present moment for making the future certain; the future is uncertainty, that is the very quality of the future. And don’t waste your time looking back; the past has happened, it is a dead phenomenon, nothing can be done about it. What at the most you can do is you can reinterpret it, that’s all. That’s what psychoanalysis is doing: reinterpreting it. Reinterpretation can be done, but the past remains the same.

Psychoanalysis and astrology...astrology tries somehow to make the future certain, and psychoanalysis tries to re-do the past. Neither is a science. Both are not sciences, both things are impossible, but both have millions of followers, because man likes it that way. He wants to be certain about the future, so he goes to the astrologer, he consults the I Ching, he goes to a Tarot reader, and there are a thousand and one ways to fool oneself, to deceive oneself. And then there are people who say they can change the past he consults them also. Once these two things are dropped, you become free of all sorts of foolishnesses; then you don’t go to the psychoanalyst and you don’t go to the astrologer. Then you know the past is finished...you also be finished with it. And the future has not happened; whenever it happens we will see, nothing can be done about it right now. You can only destroy the present moment, which is the only moment available, real. The West has been continuously looking into the problems, how to solve them. The West takes the problems very seriously. And when you are going in a certain logic, given the premises, that logic looks perfect. I was just reading one anecdote....

A great philosopher and world-renowned mathematician is aboard an airplane. He is sitting in his seat and thinking great mathematical problems when suddenly an announcement comes from the captain: ”I am sorry, there will be a a slight delay. Engine number one has cut out and we are now flying on three engines.” About ten minutes later another announcement: ”I am afraid there will be further delay engines two and three have cut out and there is only number four left.”

So the philosopher turns to the fellow sitting next to him and says, ”Good golly! If the other one cuts out, we will be up here all night!” When you are thinking in a certain line, the very direction of it makes certain things possible, absurd things also possible. Once you have taken human problems very seriously, once you start thinking about man as a problem, you have accepted some premise; you have taken the first step wrongly. Now you can go into the direction, and you can go on and on.... Now such great literature has come up in this century about mind phenomena, psychoanalysis millions of papers are written and treatises and books. Once Freud opened the doors of a certain logic, it dominated the whole century.
The East has a totally different outlook. First, it says no problem is serious. The moment you say no problem is serious, the problem is almost ninety-nine percent dead. Your whole vision changes about it. The second thing the East says is: the problem is there because you are identified with it. It has nothing to do with the past, nothing to do with its history. You are identified with it that is the real thing. And that is the key to solve all problems.

For example: you are an angry person. If you go to the psychoanalyst, he will say, ”Go into the past.... How did this anger arise? In what situations did it become more and more conditioned and imprinted on your mind? We will have to wash out all those imprints; we will have to wipe them off. We will have to clean your past completely.”
If you go to an Eastern mystic, he will say, ”You think that you are anger, you feel identified with the anger that is where things are going wrong. Next time anger happens, you just be a watcher, you just be a witness. You don’t get identified with the anger. Don’t say, ’I am anger.’ Don’t say, ’I am angry.’ Just see it happening as if it is happening on a TV screen. Look at yourself as if you are looking at somebody else.”

You are pure consciousness. When the cloud of anger comes around you, just watch it, and remain alert so that you don’t get identified. The whole thing is how not to become identified with the problem. Once you have learned it...and then there is no question of ’so many problems’...because the key, the same key, will open all the locks. It is so with anger, it is so with greed, it is so with sex; it is so with everything else that the mind is capable of.

The East says: Just remain unidentified. Remember that’s what Gurdjieff means when he says ’self-remembering’. Remember that you are a witness! Be mindful! that’s what Buddha says. Be alert that a cloud is passing by! Maybe the cloud comes from the past, but that is meaningless. It must have a certain past, it cannot come just out of the blue; it must be coming from a certain sequence of events but that is irrelevant. Why be bothered about it? Right now, this very moment, you can become detached from it, you can cut yourself away from it. The bridge can be broken right now and it can be broken only in the now.

Going into the past won’t help. Thirty years before, the anger arose and you got identified with it that day. Now you cannot get unidentified from that past, it is no longer there. But you can get unidentified this moment, this very moment. And then the whole series of angers of your past is no more part of you. The question is relevant. Jayananda has asked: ”You spoke in several recent discourses on the no-problem, the nonexistence of our problems. Having been brought up in a repressive Catholic family....” You can right now become a non-Catholic. Now, I say! You will not have to go back and undo whatsoever your parents and your society and the priest and the church have done. That will be a sheer wastage of precious present time. In the first place it has destroyed many years; now again it will be destroying your present moments. You can simply drop out of it, just as a snake slips out of the old skin.

”Having been brought up in a repressive Catholic family, and having spent twenty-one years in an equally crazy educational system are you saying that all the coats of armor, all the conditionings and all the repressions do not exist...?” No, they exist. But they exist either in the body or in the brain; they don’t exist in your consciousness, because the consciousness cannot be conditioned. Consciousness remains free! Freedom is its innermost quality, freedom is its nature. In fact even asking it, you are showing that freedom. When you say, ”twenty-one years in a crazy educational system,” when you say, ”having been brought up in a repressive Catholic family,” in this moment you are not identified. You can look: so many years of Catholic repression, so many years of a certain education. In this moment, when you are looking at it, this consciousness is no longer Catholic otherwise who will be aware? If you had really become Catholic, then who would be aware? Then there would be no possibility of becoming aware.

If you can say, ”twenty-one years in an equally crazy educational system,” one thing is certain: you are not yet crazy. The system has failed, it didn’t work. Jayananda, you are not crazy, hence you can see the whole system as crazy. A madman cannot see that he is mad, only a sane person can see that this is madness. To see madness as madness, sanity is needed. Those twenty-one years of crazy system have failed, all that repressive conditioning has failed. It cannot really succeed. It succeeds only in the proportion that you get identified with it. Any moment you can stand aloof.... It is there I am not saying it is not there but it is no longer part of your consciousness. This is the beauty of consciousness: consciousness can slip out of anything; there is no barrier to it, no boundary to it. Just a moment before you were an Englishman. Understanding the nonsense of nationalism a second later, you are no longer an Englishman.

I am not saying that your white skin will change, it will remain white; but you are no longer identified with the whiteness, you are no longer against the black. You see the stupidity of it. I am not saying that just by seeing that you are no longer an Englishman, you will forget the English language, no. It will still be there in your memory, but your consciousness has slipped out, your consciousness is standing on a hillock looking at the valley. Now the Englishman is dead in the valley and you are standing on the hills, far away, unattached, untouched. The whole Eastern methodology can be reduced to one word: witnessing. And the whole Western methodology can be reduced to one thing: analyzing. Analyzing, you go round and round. Witnessing, you simply get out of the circle.

Analysis is a vicious circle. If you really go into analysis, you will be simply puzzled how is it possible? If, for example, you try to go into the past, where will you end? Where exactly? If you go into the past, where did your sexuality start? When you were fourteen years of age? But then it came out of the blue? It must have been getting ready in the body. So when? When you were born? But then, when you were in the mother’s womb, wasn’t it getting ready? Then when? The moment you were conceived? But before that half of your sexuality was maturing in your mother’s egg and half of the sexuality was maturing in your father’s sperm. Now go on.... Where will you end? you will have to go to Adam and Eve. And even then it does not end: you will have to go to Father God himself. Why in the first place did he create Adam?...
 
Analysis will always remain half, so analysis never helps anybody really, it cannot help. It makes you a little more adjusted to your reality, that’s all. It is a sort of adjustment, it helps you to attain a little bit of understanding about your problems, their genesis, how they have arisen. And that little intellectual understanding helps you to adjust to the society better, but you remain the same person. There is no transformation through it, there is no radical change through it.
Witnessing is a revolution. It is a radical change from the very roots! It brings a totally new man into existence, because it takes your consciousness out of all the conditionings. Conditionings are there in the body and in the mind, but consciousness remains unconditioned. It is pure, always pure; it is virgin. Its virginity cannot be violated.
The Eastern approach is to make you mindful of this virgin consciousness, of this purity, of this innocence. That’s what Saraha is saying to the king again and again. Our emphasis is on the sky and the Western emphasis is on the clouds. Clouds have a genesis: if you want to find out from where they come, you will have to go to the ocean, then to the sunrays and the evaporation of the water and the clouds forming...and you can go on, but it will be moving in a circle. The clouds form, then again they come, fall in love with the trees, start pouring again into the earth; become rivers, go to the ocean, start evaporating, rising again on sunrays; become clouds, again fall on the earth.... It goes on and on, round and round and round. It is a wheel. From where will you be out? One thing will lead to another and you will be in the wheel.

The sky has no genesis, the sky is uncreated; it is not produced by anything. In fact for anything to be, a sky is needed as a must, a priori: it has to exist before anything else can exist. You can ask the Christian theologian he says God created the world. Ask him whether before he created the world there was any sky or not. If there was no sky, where God used to exist? He must have needed space...if there was no space, where did he create the world? Where did he put the world? Space is a must...even for God to exist. You cannot say, ”God created space,” that would be absurd, because then he would not have had any space to exist. Space must precede God. The sky has always been there. The Eastern approach is to become mindful of the sky. The Western approach makes you more and more alert to the clouds and helps you a little, but it doesn’t make you aware of your innermost core. Circumference yes, you become a little more aware of the circumference...but not aware of the center. And the circumference is a cyclone; you have to find the center of the cyclone, and that happens only through witnessing.

Witnessing will not change your conditioning, witnessing will not change your body musculature. But witnessing will simply give you an experience that you are beyond all musculature, all conditioning. In that moment of beyondness, in that moment of transcendence, no problem exists, not for you. And now it is up to you.... The body will still carry the musculature and the mind will still carry the conditioning now it is up to you: if sometimes you are hankering for the problem, you can get into the mindbody and have the problem and enjoy it. If you don’t want to have it, you can remain out. The problem will remain as an imprint in the bodymind phenomenon, but you will be aloof and away from it.
That’s how a buddha functions. You use memory; a buddha also uses memory, but he is not identified with it. He uses memory as a mechanism. For example, I am using language...when I have to use language I use the mind and all the imprints, but continuously I am not the mind that awareness is there. So I remain the boss, the mind remains a servant. When the mind is called, it comes; its utility is there, but it cannot dominate. So your question is right: problems will exist, but they will exist only in the seed form in the body and the mind. How can you change your past? You have been a Catholic in the past; if for forty years you have been a Catholic, how can you change those forty years and not be a Catholic? No, those forty years will remain as a period of being Catholic. No, but you can slip out of it; now you know that that was just identification. Those forty years cannot be destroyed, and there is no need to destroy them. If you are the master of the house, there is no need. You can use even those forty years in a certain way, in a creative way. Even that crazy education can be used in a creative way.

”What about all the imprints left on the brain, on the musculature of the body?” They will be there but as a seed, potentially there. If you feel too lonely and you want problems, you can have them. If you feel too miserable without miseries, you can have them; they will remain always available. But there is no need to have them, there is no necessity to have them; it will be your choice. The future humanity will have to decide whether it has to go on the path of analysis or it has to change to the path of witnessing. I use both methods. I use analysis; particularly for seekers who come from the West, I put them in the groups. Those groups are analytical, those groups are by-products of psychoanalysis. They have grown; Freud will not be able to recognize encounter if he comes, or primal therapy. It will be difficult for him to recognize. ”What is happening? Have all these people gone mad?” But they are offshoots of his work; he was the pioneer, without him there would be no primal therapy. He started the whole game.
When Western people come to me, I put them into the groups. That is good for them, they should start with what is easier for them. Then by and by slowly I change. First they go into cathartic groups like encounter, primal therapy, and then I start putting them into intensive enlightenment, then vipassana. Vipassana is a witnessing. From encounter to vipassana there is a great synthesis. When you move from encounter to vipassana, you are moving from West to East.

The third question:
Osho, Do your actions also bring the same proportion of good and bad in the world? What actions? Can you detect any actions in me...except talking? And in that too I take every care to contradict everything I say. So in the end, just emptiness.... That is the use of contradiction. If I say plus one, immediately I say minus one, and the total result is zero.
I am not a doer, I don’t do anything. All that you can call action is my talking to you, and that is so contradictory that it cannot bring either good or bad. I go on negating myself. And if you understand this state of no-action, you will have understood the highest possibility of consciousness. The highest consciousness is not a doer, it is a being. And if something like action appears there, it is just playful. My talking is just a play. And the whole effort is that you don’t become dogmatic about me. You cannot become, I don’t allow that possibility. I contradict so much, how can you create a dogma? If you try to create a dogma, immediately you will find I have contradicted it.

A Christian missionary used to come to see me, and he said, ”You have spoken so much. Now what is needed is a small book which introduces your philosophy, something like a Christian catechism, in short.” I said, ”That will be difficult. If somebody is going to put me ’in short’, he will go mad. And he will not find any way to choose and what to choose.”
Once I am gone many people are going to become insane working on their Ph.D. theses on me, because I have said all that can be said, and I have denied all that can be denied.

The fourth question:
Osho, A question in bad faith: Why do you talk so much against the ego? Isn’t the ego also a manifestation of God, a game played by existence?
If you understand that, then there is no problem about the ego. That is the whole purpose of why I go on talking against the ego, so that you are not and God is. If you have come to such a deep understanding, that the ego is also God’s play, then it is perfectly good! Then there is no problem, then there is no need to drop because you have nothing to drop.
If you understand that ego is also God’s play, then you are not in it. Everything is God’s that’s what egolessness means even ego.
But beware! You may be just playing a trick upon yourself, and mind is very cunning. In the name of God you may be trying to save your ego. It is up to you, but be watchful. If you have really understood that all is God’s, then you are not.

So where is the ego, what does ego mean? It means: I have a private life, I am not part of the universal flux. I am not part of the river, I am swimming, I am going upstream; I have my own private goals. I don’t care where existence is going; I have my own pri-vate goals and I am trying to find them and achieve them. Ego means having a private goal. Ego is idiotic.

The word idiot is very beautiful. It means having a private idiom, it means having a private goal, a private style. Ego is idiotic. It simply says, ”I am not part of the universal; I am private, I am separate. I am an island, I don’t belong to the continent.” This not belonging to the whole is what ego is, this idea of being separate. That’s why all the mystics have been saying: Drop the ego. What are they saying? They are saying: Don’t be separate. Dropping the ego does not mean anything else: Don’t be separate, be together with existence. And don’t flow against the river that is foolish; you will be simply tired and defeated. Go with the river! All the way, go with the river; you are part of the river. And then there will be relaxation and rest and joy. With the river there is joy, against the river there is strain, anxiety. Ego creates anxiety and strain. Now you ask: ”Why do you talk so much against the ego? Isn’t the ego also a manifestation of God, a game played by existence?” If you have come to understand that, then to you at least I am not saying to drop the ego; then you don’t have any ego to drop. But be very careful and cautious: mind is so cunning. I have heard this small anecdote....

A monkey and a hyena were walking through the jungle together when the hyena said, ”Every time I go through those bushes over there, a big lion jumps out and keeps on hitting me and hitting me, and I don’t know why!” ”Well I will come with you this time,” said the monkey, ”and I will stick up for you.” So they walked along together, and just as they got to the bushes a lion jumped out on them and started hitting the hyena. The monkey just climbed up in a tree and watched. So when the lion had gone the half-dead hyena asked the monkey, ”Why didn’t you come down and help me?”

And the monkey said, ”You were laughing so much I thought you were winning.” Beware of the ego! It can find ways and means to protect itself. It can rationalize well; the ego is a great rationalist, and rationalization is its whole foundation.

The fifth question:
Osho, Please say this to me so I can stop worrying about it: ”Arup, everything is going absolutely beautifully with you. No matter how much your mind is trying, now it is too late. I have got you safely under my wing and there is no way back. And you are going to be more and more blissful from now on.” Thank you Osho. I hope it is so, but sometimes I waver.
The question is from Arup. Now the first thing: you say that I have to say to you, ”Everything is going absolutely beautifully with you.”
Just by my saying it, it will not become beautiful. It may give you a consolation, but I am not here to give you any consolation. Either take the real thing or don’t bother at all. Consolation is a false thing. It is a toy to play with, it is just to pass time, and passing time is wasting time.

And another thing, you say, ”Everything is going absolutely beautifully”...difficult...”absolutely beautifully”...difficult. Nothing is absolute here on the earth...except witnessing. Ugly is not absolute, beautiful is not absolute, happiness is not absolute, unhappiness is not absolute only witnessing. And when you witness, you feel neither ugly nor beautiful, neither happy nor unhappy; you simply feel a witness.

My whole work is to make you a witness. You would like to have everything beautiful, you don’t want to be a witness. You want to have more pleasurable experiences; that’s why you constantly seek consolation. People come to me not really to be helped but to be consoled, just to be patted on the back. If I say everything is going good, they feel good, but how long is this feeling going to help? It will wear off sooner or later. Again they have to come, and again they wait for me to pat them on the head. This is not going to help you. You need a transformation. And this will create a dependence on me, and I am not to make you dependent on me. You have to be independent, you have to be your own self, you have to be on your own. ”No matter how much your mind is trying, now it is too late.”

It is never too late! You can go back any time, because the mind is always there. You can again slip into the old skin, you can again become identified with it. And when it is really too late, then you will not ask this question. Then you will know that now there is no possibility of going back. This will be a certainty in you, this will be your own knowing; you will not need my certificate for it. Just because you need a certificate, it shows it has not happened. You are wavering.
I have heard....

Mulla Nasruddin was standing in the court. ”This crime was the work of a master criminal,” said the prosecutor, ”and was carried out in a skillful, clever manner.”
Blushing, Mulla Nasruddin, the defendant, rose to his feet and said, ”Sir, flattery will get you nowhere I ain’t gonna confess.” But he has confessed. Arup has confessed. This is not a question, this is a confession that she feels worried. It is natural. It is inhuman to expect no worry, at this stage at least. Sometimes she feels wavering...that is human, natural; it is good to accept it rather than deny it, rather than create a screen and hide it. ”Please say this to me so that I can stop worrying about it.”

How will you stop worrying about it just by my saying it? If it were so easy, I would have said it to everybody. It is not so easy. Whatsoever I say, you will interpret it in your own way, and you will find new worries. Whatsoever I say, you will have to interpret it you cannot accept it totally, you cannot trust it totally. And I am not saying that you have to trust it totally, I am saying this is simply natural. I don’t ask any unnatural thing from you. I don’t ask any absurd things from you. It is natural! Sometimes you waver, sometimes you are against me, sometimes you are very negative. Sometimes you feel just to drop everything and go away back to your old world. I don’t say that you are doing something criminal, no; it is just human, it is very natural. If you are not doing such things, then something is wrong, then something is amiss. Whatsoever I say will again be interpreted by the same worrying mind. Even if I say exactly, ”Yes, Arup, everything is going absolutely beautifully with you,” you will think, ”Was Osho joking? Does he really mean it?” The worrying mind will jump upon it, your interpretations are bound to be there. Listen to this small story....
A priest was returning home late at night from a meeting. As he drove along, he suddenly remembered that he had not said evensong. He pulled up at the side of a quiet country lane, got out of his car and using the light of his car headlamps began to say the office.

Not long after he had begun, and much to his surprise, a lorry came along. The driver of the lorry, thinking that something was wrong, stopped, let down his window, and asked, ”Having a spot of trouble, mate?” ”No, everything is all right, thank you,” replied the priest.

The driver put his lorry in gear and, not to be outdone as he pulled away, cried out, ”All I can say is, that must be a helluva good book you are reading there!”
Now just think of somebody reading a book on a lonely lane by the headlights of the car...what will you think? Can you imagine somebody reading the Bible? What is the hurry to read the Bible? Can somebody be so interested in reading the Bible, can’t he wait and go home and read it there? The lorry driver must have interpreted according to his mind he said, ”All I can say is, that must be a helluva good book you are reading there!”

You continuously interpret, and you interpret, naturally, according to your mind. What I say will not be heard, you will hear it in your own way. If you are worrying, you will worry about it. If you are doubting, you will doubt about it. If you are negative, you will be negative about it. If you are trusting, you will trust. Arup says, ”Just say to me so that I can stop worrying about it.” No, worrying cannot be stopped that easily. My saying it will not help, you will have to do something; you will have to do what I say. You will have to be a little more practical. You will have to do witnessing....

There were three very hungry tramps, and they came to the house where the governor was cooking rice. And he said to them that they could stay the night and whoever had the best dream could have some hot rice. So the next morning the first tramp said, ”I dreamed that I was the king.” The second tramp said, ”That’s nothing I dreamed I was God himself.” And the third tramp said, ”My dream was very ordinary and I don’t stand a chance of winning at all. I dreamed about that hot rice getting cold, so I went down and ate it.”
This is what I mean by being practical! So, Arup, be practical. Do what I say. Just my saying it won’t help...and the rice is really getting cold. You want me to help create a dream in you, and the rice is getting cold. You just go down and eat the rice.

This will just give you a dream if I say: ”Arup, everything is going absolutely beautifully with you. No matter how much your mind is trying, now it is too late. I have got you safely under my wing and there is no way back.” In the first place, I cannot say it because the very desire to be safe and secure is against spiritual growth. I am pushing you into a dangerous realm, I am pushing you into an abyss. You would like to be safely under my wings; now, I am throwing you into the very turmoil of existence, with no safety, with no security. I am not a protector, I am a destroyer. I am not your security; if you really understand me, I am going to become your dangerous life. You will always be insecure if you have understood me. You will never ask for safety and security. You will abhor safety and security, you will think of them as enemies they are. You will enjoy being in the open, vulnerable to all that is possible in life. Yes, vulnerable to death too; ’all’ includes death too. A real life is encountering death each moment. Only unreal, plastic lives are safe.

No, I cannot say that...that I have got you safely under my wing and there is no way back. You can fall, you can fall from the very last rung. Unless you become enlightened, there is a way back, you can go back: you can deny, you can betray, you can reject. You can fall into the misery again; from the very last rung also you can fall. Until and unless you have crossed the whole ladder, even the last rung, until and unless you are just a nobody, you can fall back. A slight ego, just a tremor of ego, is enough to bring you back. It can again condense, it can again integrate, it can again become a new trip.

And safety is not my way; to be a sannyasin means you are ready to live life without safety. That is the greatest courage, and with that great courage, great bliss becomes possible. ”And you are going to be more and more and more blissful from now on.” I am not an Emile Cou, I am not a hypnotist. Yes, you can hypnotize yourself this way: that was the very methodology of Cou. He would tell his patients, ”Think, dream, imagine, visualize each night before going to sleep, each morning after the sleep, repeat again and again and again ’I am getting better, I am getting healthier, I am getting happier....’ Repeat, go on repeating.” Yes, it helps a little, it creates an illusion around you. But would you like me to help you in creating illusions? My whole approach is that of dehypnosis, it is not of hypnosis at all. I don’t want you to be hypnotized by any illusion. I want you to be utterly dehypnotized of all illusions. When you are in a state of disillusionment, utter disillusionment, enlightenment is very close by.
Then Arup says, ”Thank you, Osho. I hope it is so....”

See! Her mind has already started interpreting: ”I hope it is so....” It is not so, she simply hopes. How you can deceive yourself!
”I hope it is so, but sometimes I waver.” I am not condemning your wavering it is perfectly okay to waver sometimes, it is perfectly human to waver sometimes. It is perfectly right! Never condemn it, accept it. Don’t try to create a false unwavering: that will be of the mind, and will be a deception, and will not lead you anywhere. Let it be as it is. Accept it as it is, and become more and more watchful, become more and more of a witness. Only in that witnessing, you will be safe. Only in that witnessing, you will become more and more blissful every day not by repeating it! Only in that witnessing, you will stop wavering. Only in that witnessing, you will come to the center of your being where death exists not, where only life abundant is, where one is drinking the nectar Saraha talks about.

The sixth question:
Osho, What is it exactly that is obstructing my vision from seeing the obvious? I just do not understand what to do and what not to do. When will I be able to hear the sound of silence? What is it exactly that is obstructing my vision from seeing the obvious? the very desire to see it. The obvious cannot be desired, the obvious is!
You desire, you go away: you start seeking for it. In that very moment you have made it distant, it is no longer obvious, it is no longer close-by; you have put it far away. How can you seek the obvious? If you understand it is obvious, how can you seek it? It is just there! What is the need to seek it and to desire it? The obvious is the divine, the mundane is the sublime, and the trivial is profound. In your day-to-day, ordinary activities, you are meeting God every moment of it, because there is nobody else. You cannot meet anybody else, it is always God in a thousand and one forms. God is very obvious. Only God is! But you seek, you desire...and you miss. In your very seeking you put God very distant, far away. That is an ego trick. Try to understand it....The ego is not interested in the obvious because the ego cannot exist with the obvious. Ego is not interested at all in the close-by, the ego is interested in the distant, faraway. Just think: man has reached to the moon, and man has not yet reached to his own heart. The distant...man has invented space travel but still he has not developed soul travel. He has reached Everest, but he does not bother to go into his own being. The close-by is missed and the faraway is sought. Why?
The ego feels good; if the journey is hard the ego feels good, there is something to prove. If it is difficult, there is something to prove. To go to the moon the ego feels good, but to go into one’s own being will not be much of a claim.

There is an old story....
God created the world. Then he used to live on the earth. You can imagine...his troubles were too many, everybody was complaining, everybody was knocking at odd hours. In the night people would come and they would say, ”This is wrong, and today we need rain and it is so hot.” And somebody would come just afterwards and he would say, ”Don’t bring rains I am doing something and it will spoil everything.” And God was getting almost mad...”What to do? So many people, so many desires, and everybody expecting and everybody needs fulfillment, and their desires are so contradictory! The farmer wants the rain and the potter wants no rain because he has made pots and they will be destroyed; he needs hot sun for a few days....” And so on and so forth.

Then God called his council and asked, ”What to do? They will drive me crazy, and I cannot satisfy them all. Or they will murder me someday! I would like some place to hide.”
And they suggested many things. Somebody said, ”That is not a problem, you just go to Everest. That is the highest peak in the Himalayas, nobody will ever reach there.”
God said, ”You don’t know! Just after a few seconds” for God that is just after a few seconds ”Edmund Hillary will reach there with Tensing, and then the trouble will start. And once they know, then they will start coming in helicopters and buses, and everything will.... No, that won’t do. It will solve things for a few seconds.” Remember, God’s time has a different way. In India we say millions of years is one day to God, so a few seconds.... Then somebody suggested, ”And why not the moon?”

He said, ”That too is not very far; a few seconds more and somebody will reach the moon.” And they suggested faraway stars, but God said, ”That is not going to solve the problem. It’s simply a sort of postponement. I want a permanent solution.” Then an old servant of God came close, whispered something in his ear, and God said, ”You are right. That will do!”
And the old servant had said, ”There is only one place where man will never reach you hide in man himself.” And that is the place where God has been hiding since then: in man himself. That is the last thing man will ever think of.

The obvious is the missed, because ego is not interested. Ego is interested in hard, difficult, arduous things, because there is a challenge. When you win, you can claim. If the obvious is there and you win, what sort of victory is this? You are not much of a winner. That’s why man goes on missing the obvious and goes on seeking the distant. And how can you seek the distant when you cannot even seek the obvious? ”What is it exactly that is obstructing my vision from seeing the obvious?” The very desire is taking you astray. Drop the desire and you will see the obvious. ”I just do not understand what to do and what not to do.”

You are not to do anything. You have just to be watchful of all that is happening around you. Doing is again an ego trip. Doing, ego feels good something is there to do. Doing is a food for the ego, it strengthens the ego. Nondoing, and ego falls flat on the ground; it dies, it is no more nourished. So just be a nondoer. Don’t do anything as far as God, truth and the search for it is concerned. It is not a search in the first place, so you cannot do anything about it. You just be. Let me say it in another way: If you are in a state of being, God comes to you. Man can never find him; he finds man. Just be in a silent space not doing anything, not going anywhere, not dreaming and in that silent space suddenly you will find he is there. He has always been there! Just you were not silent, so you couldn’t see him, you could not hear his still, small voice. ”When will I be able to hear the sound of silence?”

When? you ask a wrong question. Now or never! Hear it now, because it is there, the music is on, the music is all over. Just you need to be silent so that you can hear it. But never say ’when’; ’when’ means you have brought future in; ’when’ means you have started hoping and dreaming; ’when’ means not now. And it is always now, it is always now-time. For God there is only one time, now; and only one place, here. ’There’, ’then’ drop them.

And the last question:
Osho, Do you ever feel at a loss with words?
The question is from Rishi. Each time I utter a word I feel at a loss, because that which I want to say cannot be said. And that which has to be conveyed cannot be conveyed. Then you will naturally ask, why do I go on speaking?

I am trying hard. Maybe today I have failed...tomorrow? Yesterday I failed...today? I go on speaking in different ways maybe this way you have not heard, in some other way maybe it will be closer to you. This way somebody has heard, you have not heard; in another way maybe you will be able to hear it. But I am at a loss continuously...words don’t come easily because the message is wordless. I am not a priest, I am not trying to give you some dogma, I am not trying to explain some theory to you. Something has happened in me, something has happened to me; I am trying to convey that. I am trying to commune with you. Words are very awkward. They are very tiny and very small, they cannot contain that which I want them to contain. So each moment I am at a loss. People who don’t have any experience are never at a loss; any word will do.
I have heard a beautiful story, meditate over it....
A parish priest was having a few words with his bishop and in the course of conversation said, ”It is all right for you, my lord when you prepare a sermon you can deliver it to several churches in the diocese, but I have to give two new sermons every Sunday.”
The bishop replied, ”You should be able to give a sermon on almost any subject at a moment’s notice, as I can.”
”I will take you up on that,” said the parson. ”You come to my church next Sunday and I will put you to the test.”

The bishop agreed and in due course went to the pulpit, to find a card with the one word ’constipation’ written on it. That was the subject. Without hesitation he started: ”And Moses took two tablets and went out onto the mountainside....” A priest is never at a loss, he has so many scriptures available he can always find something from his memory. I am continuously at a loss because what I want to say to you is not a subject matter: it is my subjectivity. What I want to say to you is my heart, it is not my mind. Unfortunately I have to use the mind because there is no other way. Even to convey the heart one has to use the mind, hence the absurdity of it. It is very irrational, it is trying to do the impossible! But there is no other way...I am helpless. But if you ask, am I ever at a loss for words? I am, constantly. Each single word, and I hesitate: Will it do? How can it do? Knowing it is not going to help, I go on using it: it is a necessary evil. Silence would be better, far better, but when I look at you then I hesitate. If I become silent it will be even more difficult for you to come closer to me. You cannot understand the words, how will you be able to understand the silence? And if you can understand silence, you will be able to hear that silence in my words too. If I become silent, then at the most five percent of you will be around me. Those five percent can understand through the words too, because they are listening to my silence, not to my words. So there is no problem for those five percent. But the other ninety-five percent who cannot understand words and cannot understand the silence contained in them will be simply lost. I will not be able to help them at all. Through my words they at least go on hanging around.

In their hanging around there is a possibility that, in some unguarded moment, they may have a contact with me. Some unguarded moment...and in spite of themselves they may come closer to me, they may stumble upon me; some unguarded moment, and I may penetrate into their heart, something may be stirred. It is a perhaps, but it is worth going on.
That five percent will be helped either way, but this ninety-five percent will not be helped by silence. And that five percent also, if I had been silent from the very beginning, would not be here. That five percent shows the way, so that the ninety-five percent by and by will be ninety percent, eighty-five percent, eighty percent.... The day I feel at least fifty percent of people can understand silence, then words can be dropped. I am not very happy about them, nobody ever was: neither was Lao Tzu, nor was Saraha, nor was Buddha nobody ever was. But they all had to use words. Not because silence cannot be a communion; silence can be a communion, but for that a very high consciousness is needed.
Once it happened....

Two great mystics of India, Kabir and Farid, met, and for two days sat silently together. The disciples were very much frustrated: they wanted them to talk, they wanted them to talk so that they could hear something valuable. They were hoping, for months they were hoping, that Kabir and Farid would meet and there would be a great showering, and they would enjoy it. But they were just sitting silently, and the disciples were dozing, yawning. ”What to do? And what has happened to these two people?” because they were never silent before: Kabir was never silent with his disciples and neither was Farid silent with his disciples, they were continuously hammering on their disciples. ”Why? What has happened? Have they gone dumb?” but they could not say anything, it was not appropriate.

After two days, when Kabir and Farid hugged each other and said goodbye that too in silence and when the disciples were left with their masters, they jumped upon their masters. And the followers of Kabir said, ”What went wrong? And for months we have been waiting for Farid to come, and he came, and you never spoke a single word. And we were waiting and waiting...we got tired! These two days have been hell!” And Kabir laughed. He said, ”But there was nothing to say, he can understand silence. If I had said anything he would have thought me ignorant, because when silence is there and silence can say it, what is the use of words?” And the followers of Farid asked Farid, ”What happened? Why didn’t you speak?” Farid said, ”Are you mad? Speaking with Kabir? We are exactly at the same space, so there is nothing to convey, nothing to say! The moment I looked into his eyes and he looked into my eyes, we recognized. The dialogue finished at the first moment!”

”Then for two days...what were you doing for two days?”
And Farid said, ”We were just enjoying each other, each other’s space; we were guests to each other. We overlapped each other, we overflowed each other, we mingled with each other. We danced, we sang, but it all happened in silence. When silence can speak, what is the need of language?” I am continuously at a loss for words. Each word I utter very hesitatingly, knowing well that it is not going to suffice, it is not adequate. Nothing is ever adequate. Truth is so vast and words are so small. Enough for today.

Truth is neither holy nor unholy

It is in the beginning, In the middle, And the end; Yet end and beginning Are nowhere else. All those with minds Deluded by interpretative thoughts Are in two minds And so discuss nothingness and Compassion as two things. Bees know that in flowers Honey can be found. That samsara and nirvana Are not two How will the deluded Ever understand?
When the deluded in a mirror look They see a face, not a reflection. So the mind that has truth denied Relies on that which is not true.
Though the fragrance of a flower Cannot be touched, ’Tis all pervasive And at once perceptible. So by unpatterned being-in-itself Recognize the round Of mystic circles.
Truth is. It simply is. It just is. It never comes into existence, never goes out of existence. It never comes, it never goes; it abides. In fact that which abides, we call it truth; it remains. That which remains, remains forever, is called truth. It is in the beginning, it is in the middle, it is in the end. In fact there is no beginning, no middle, no end. It is all over.

Looked into deeply, the beginning is in it, the middle is in it, the end is in it; it pervades all, because only it is. In millions of forms it is the same reality that is being expressed. Forms are different, but the substance, the essence, is the same.
Forms are like waves and the essence is like the ocean.

Remember, Tantra does not talk about God. To talk about God is a little anthropomorphic. It is to create God in man’s image, it is to think about God in human terms; that is creating a limitation. God must be like human beings, true, but he must be like horses also, and he must be like dogs too, and he must be like rocks, and he must be like stars.... He must be like all. Yes, man will be included as a form, but man cannot be the form. Just think of God as a horse it looks absurd. Think of God as a dog it looks sacrilegious. But we go on thinking of God as man, and it doesn’t look sacrilegious? It is the human ego. Man feels very, very happy when he can think in terms of God being like him. In the Bible it is said God created man in his own image...certainly this is written by man. If horses were writing their Bible they would not write that, certainly not. They might even write that God created the devil in man’s image, because God how can God create man in his own image, and man has been so cruel to horses? Nothing in man seems to be divine; ask a horse. Maybe the devil, maybe a representative of Beelzebub, but not God at all.

Tantra drops that whole anthropomorphism. Tantra brings things to their right proportion, puts man in his right place. Tantra is a great vision: it is not centered on man, it is not centered on any partial attitude. It sees reality as it is, in its suchness, in its tathata, in its thusness. It does not talk about God. Instead of God, Tantra talks about truth.
Truth is nonpersonal, impersonal. Truth can have the qualities of all, there is no limitation in it. The Bible says: In the beginning God created the world. Tantra says: How can there be any beginning and how can there be any end? and when there is no beginning and no end, how can there be a middle? It is all eternity, it is not time; Tantra is a vision beyond time. In time there is a beginning and there is a middle and there is an end, but in eternity there is no beginning, no middle, no end. It simply is.

Truth is not temporal. In fact time exists in truth as a wave, and space exists in truth as a wave. It is not vice versa. Truth does not exist in space, does not exist in time. Time and space exist in truth, they are modes of truth. Just as a horse is a form, a man is a form, so is space a form, a bigger wave, so is time. Truth is timelessness. Truth is spacelessness. Truth is transcendence. Truth exists by itself. Everything else exists with the support of truth. Truth is self-evident; nothing else is self-evident. Truth is the very ground of being, the ultimate substratum of existence. Tantra does not create any ritual, does not create any worship, does not create any temple, does not create the priesthood; they are not needed. Man can stand face to face with truth in direct relationship; no mediator is needed, no priest is needed. The priests go on talking about truth and God and heaven and a thousand and one things, not knowing anything of what they are talking about. Words, mere words...they have not experienced, those words are just empty.
I was reading about a very famous priest who had been feeling unwell for some time; he called in his doctor who gave him a thorough overhaul. ”Well,” he said, ”I will be quite frank with you: I am afraid that your lungs are not in good shape. You ought to spend a few months in Switzerland.” ”Oh, dear,” replied the priest. ”I’m afraid I could not manage it. That will not be possible. My finances won’t allow me. I’m a poor man, you know.”
”Well it’s up to you. It is either Switzerland or heaven.”
The priest thought for a while and then said, ”Oh, all right then, Switzerland.” Who wants to go to heaven? not even the priest who continuously talks about it. It is a trick to paint death in beautiful colors, but you know all the time it is death. How can you befool yourself?

Gurdjieff used to say that if you want to get rid of religion... live near a priest and you will get rid of religion. Maybe the ordinary human being is deceived, but how can the priest be deceived? He himself is creating the whole deception. No priest is ever deceived. They talk about one thing, they know something else. They say one thing, they do something else. I was reading about a rabbi....

A Jew, a young man, came to his rabbi. ”Rabbi, could I ask your advice on rather an important matter?” ”Certainly,” came the reply.
”Well it’s like this: I am in love with two girls.... That is, I think I am. Now, one is very beautiful but has no money, while the other is rather nice but very plain, although she has plenty of money. What would you do in the circumstances? If you were me, rabbi, what would you do?”
”Well,” said the rabbi, ”I’m sure that in your heart you love the beautiful one, so I should go ahead and marry her.”
”Right!” said the fellow. ”Thank you, rabbi. That’s what I’ll do.” As he prepared to depart, the rabbi said, ”Oh, by the way, I wonder if you could give me the address of the other girl?”
The priest, the rabbi, the parson, they know well that whatsoever they are talking about is just nonsense. It is for others, it is meant for others.
Tantra creates no priesthood. When there is no priesthood, religion is pure. Bring in the priest and he poisons it. Bring in the priest and it is bound to be poisoned, because the priest has his own investment in it. A man entered a pub and while he was drinking he saw a drunkard going out of the pub, somehow dragging himself, wavering. And then suddenly the drunkard who had gone out of the pub started making gestures as if he was driving a car, and making the noises of the engine and the honking of the horn. The newcomer was surprised. He asked the pub owner, ”Why don’t you tell this poor guy what he is doing?” The pub owner said, ”He always does that, whenever he has taken too much he does that. Now he will do it almost the whole night, he will go around and around in the town; he thinks he is driving a great car.” So the newcomer said, ”But why don’t you explain it to him?”
He said, ”Why should we explain? He gives a dollar per week to keep the car washed.” When you have an investment in somebody’s illusion, you cannot destroy that illusion. You would like that the illusion continue. Once the priest comes in, he has his investment in all your illusions: illusions about God, illusions about soul, illusions about heaven, illusions about hell; he now has a great stake. Now he depends on your illusions, he lives on your illusions, he exploits your illusions. Tantra is a disillusionment. It has not created any priesthood. Tantra says it is between you and truth itself, and there should be no one standing between you and truth. Let your heart be open to truth and truth is enough. Nobody is needed to interpret it, you are enough to know what it is. In fact the more you are full of the interpretations, the less is the possibility to know that which is.
Truth is in the beginning, truth is in the middle and truth is in the end. In fact there is no middle, no beginning, no end: it is all one. Truth is not passing, it abides.
This is the first sutra. Saraha says to the king:

It is in the beginning, in the middle, and the end; Yet end and beginning are nowhere else. End and beginning are nowhere else. Now is truth-time, and here is truth-space. This very moment truth is converging here... now. This very moment is the beginning, is the middle, is the end. You need not go into the past to know when existence began, this very moment it is beginning. You need not go into the future to see when existence will end, it is ending this very moment. Each moment is a beginning, and the middle, and the end, because each moment existence is new. Each moment it is dying and is reborn. Each moment everything goes into the state of nonmanifestation and comes back into the state of manifestation.
Now there are rumors in modern physics that this Tantra attitude may be true, may be ultimately true. It may be that each moment everything disappears and comes back again, pops back again; disappears, pops back again. But the interval is so small that we cannot see it. Tantra says that’s why it remains fresh, existence remains fresh. Except for man everything is fresh, because it is only man who carries the load, the luggage of memory. That’s why man becomes dirty, unclean, loaded, burdened; otherwise the whole existence is new and fresh. It carries no past and it imagines no future. It is simply here, totally here! When you are carrying the past, much of your being is involved in the past, a past which is not. And when you are imagining the future, much of your being is involved in the future, which is not, not yet. You are spread very thin; that’s why your life has no intensity. Tantra says to know truth one needs only one thing: intensity, total intensity. How to create this total intensity? Drop the past and drop the future. Then your whole life energy is focused on the small herenow, and in that focusing you are a fire, you are a fire alive. You are the same fire that Moses saw on the mountain, and God was standing in the fire, and the fire was not burning him. The fire was not burning even the green bush, the bush was alive and fresh and young.

The whole life is fire. To know it you need intensity, otherwise one lives lukewarm. Tantra says there is only one commandment: Don’t live lukewarm. That is not a way to live, that is a slow suicide. When you are eating, be intensely there. The ascetics have condemned tantrikas very much; they say they are just eat-drink-be-merry people. In a way they are true, but in a way they are wrong, because there is a great difference between the ordinary eat-drink-be-merry person and a tantrika.
A tantrika says: This is the way to know truth while you are eating, then let there be only eating and nothing else, then let the past disappear and the future too; then let your whole energy be poured on your food. Let there be love and affection and gratitude towards food. Chew each bite with tremendous energy and you will have not only the taste of the food but the taste of existence, because the food is part of existence. It brings life; it brings vitality, it brings prana. It makes you tick on, it helps you to remain alive, it is not just food. Food may be the container: life is contained in it. If you taste only food and you don’t taste existence in it, you are living a lukewarm life; then you don’t know how a tantrika lives. When you are drinking water, become thirst! Let there be an intensity to it, so each drop of cool water gives you tremendous joy. In that very experience of those drops of water entering your throat and giving you great contentment, you will taste God, you will taste reality.

Tantra is not ordinary indulgence: it is extraordinary indulgence. It is not ordinary indulgence because it indulges in God itself. But, Tantra says, it is through the small things of life that you have the taste. There are no big things in life, everything is small. The small thing becomes big and great if you enter into it utterly, totally, wholly.
Making love to a woman or a man, be the love. Forget everything! In that moment let there be nothing else. Let the whole existence converge on your lovemaking. Let that love be wild, innocent, innocent in the sense that there is no mind to corrupt it. Don’t think about it, don’t imagine about it, because all that imagination and thinking keeps you thin, spread thin. Let all thinking disappear. Let the act be total. You be in the act...lost, absorbed, gone ...and then, through love, you will know what God is.
Tantra says: It can be known through drinking, it can be known through eating, it can be known through love. It can be known from every space, from every corner, from every angle, because all angles are his. It is all truth. And don’t think that you are unfortunate because you were not in the beginning when God created the world. He is creating right now! You are fortunate to be here, you can see him creating this moment. And don’t think you will miss when the world disappears with a bang; it is disappearing right now. Each moment it is created, each moment it disappears. Each moment it is born, each moment it dies. So, Tantra says, let that be your life also, each moment dying to the past; each moment being born anew. Don’t carry the load. Remain empty. And...
Yet end and beginning are nowhere else.
They are herenow.

All those with minds deluded by interpretative thoughts Are in two minds And so discuss nothingness and compassion as two things.
Now there are two ways to describe this experience of truth, this existential experience of that which is, the experience of suchness. There are two ways to describe it because we have two types of words, the positive and the negative. Saraha’s emphasis is on the negative, because that was the emphasis of Buddha. Buddha liked the negative very much for a certain reason. When you describe existence with a positive word, the positive word gives it a certain boundary; all positive words have boundaries. Negative words don’t have any boundaries; the negative is unbounded.

For example, if you call existence all, God, absolute, then you are giving a certain boundary. The moment you call it ’absolute’, the notion arises that the thing is finished, that it is no more an ongoing process. You call it ’Brahma’, then it seems the perfection has arrived; now there is no more to it. When you call it God, you give it a definition, and existence is so vast, it cannot be defined. It is so vast that all positive words fall short. So Buddha has chosen the negative. He calls it shunya, nothingness, zero. Just listen to the word...nothingness. Taste it, turn it this way and that: you cannot find any boundary in it. Nothingness...it is unbounded. God? immediately there is a boundary. The moment you say ’God’, existence becomes a little smaller. The moment you say ’nothingness’, all boundaries disappear.
Buddha’s emphasis is on the negative for this reason, but remember: by nothing Buddha does not mean just nothing. When Buddha says ’nothingness’ he means no-thingness. No thing can define existence because all things are in it and it is bigger than all things. It is more than all the parts put together. Now this has to be understood...one of the Tantra attitudes.

You look at a roseflower. You can go to the chemist; he can analyze the flower and he will tell you of what constituents it is made what matter, what chemicals, what colors. He can dissect it. But if you ask, ”Where is the beauty of it?” he will shrug his shoulders. He will say, ”I could not find any beauty in it. This is all that I could find: this many colors, this much matter, these chemicals. That’s all. And I have not missed anything and nothing has been left outside. You can weigh: it is exactly the same weight as the flower. So nothing has left it. Then you must have been deluded; that beauty must have been your projection.” Tantra says: Beauty exists, but beauty is more than all the parts put together. The whole is more than the sum of the parts; that is one of the Tantra attitudes, of very great significance. Beauty is more than that of which it is constituted. Or a small baby, bubbling with joy, giggling, happy life is there. Dissect the small baby, put the baby on the surgeon’s table; what will you find after dissection? There will be no bubbling joy, there will be no laughter, no giggling. There will be no innocence found, there will be no life found.

The moment you cut the baby, the baby is gone, the life disappears. But the surgeon will insist that nothing has left. You can weigh; the parts weigh the same as the whole baby used to weigh. Nothing has left, it is exactly the same baby but can you convince the mother that it is the same baby? Are you convinced it is the same baby? And if the child belonged to the surgeon himself, would he be convinced it is the same baby, these dead limbs lying on the table? Something has disappeared. Maybe that something cannot be weighed, maybe that something is not measurable. Maybe that something is not physical, maybe that something is not material, but something has left. The baby will not dance any more, and the baby will not laugh any more, and the baby will not eat and will not drink and will not go to sleep and will not cry and will not be loving and will not be angry: something has left. Tantra says: The total is not the whole. The sum total of the parts is not the whole. The whole is more than the sum total of the parts. And in that moreness is the experience of life. Nothingness means no-thingness. All things put together will not make existence, existence is more. It is always more than its parts. That’s the beauty of it, that’s the life of it. That’s why it is so tremendously delightful, that’s why there is celebration.

So these two positive and negative words have to be remembered. Tantra will be using negative words, Buddhist Tantra especially. Hindu Tantra uses positive words. That’s one of the differences between Hindu Tantra and Buddhist Tantra. Buddha always uses ’no’ to describe the ultimate, because he says once you start giving attributes, those attributes are limiting factors.

So Buddha says: Go on eliminating neti, neti; go on saying this is not, this is not, this is not. And then, that which is left after all denial, is.
So remember that nothingness does not mean emptiness, it means fullness, but indescribable fullness. That indescribableness has been described through the word nothing.
All those with minds deluded by interpretative thoughts Are in two minds. Saraha says: Those who are too analytical, interpretative, continuously thinking in categories of mind, they are always divided, they are split. There is always a problem for them. The problem is not in existence, that problem comes from their own divided mind; their own mind is not one unity.
Now you can ask the scientist also: he says mind is divided in two parts, the left and the right, and both function differently; not only differently, both function diametrically opposite to each other. The left-side mind is analytical, and the right-side mind is intuitive. The left-side mind is mathematical, logical, syllogistic. The right-side mind is poetic, artistic, aesthetic, mystic. And they live in different categories, and there is only a very small bridge between the two, just a small link.
Sometimes it has happened that in some accident that link was broken and the man became two. In the second world war there were many cases when the link was broken and the man became two. Then he was not one man. Then sometimes he would say one thing in the morning and by the evening he would completely forget about it and he would start saying something else. In the morning one hemisphere was working, in the evening another hemisphere was working and these change.

Modern science has to look deeply into it. Yoga has looked very deeply into it: Yoga says, when your breathing changes...for nearabout forty minutes you breathe through one nostril, and then for forty minutes you breath through the other nostril. Up to now modern science has not thought about it, why the breathing changes and what the implications of it are, but Yoga has thought deeply about it. When your left nostril is working, your right mind will function; when your right nostril is working, your left mind will function. This is a sort of arrangement inside, so one mind functions only for forty minutes and then it can rest. Somehow man has felt it even without knowing exactly what it is, that after each forty minutes you have to change your work. That’s why in the schools, colleges, universities, they change the period after forty minutes. One part of the mind becomes tired. Forty minutes seems to be the ultimate limit, then it needs rest. So if you have been studying mathematics, it is good after forty minutes to study poetry; then you can come back to mathematics again.
This became very clear in the second world war that the bridge is very small, very fragile, and can be broken by any accident. And once it is broken the man functions as two, then he is not one man. For forty minutes he is one man, for forty minutes he is another man. If he borrows money from you, after forty minutes he will deny it, he will say, ”I have never taken it.” And he is not lying; remember, he is not lying. The mind that has taken is no longer functioning, so he has no memory about it. The other mind has never borrowed, the other mind will simply, flatly deny: ”Have you gone mad? I have never borrowed anything from you.” And this happens even in those whose links are not broken. You can watch your own life and you will find a rhythm, continuously. Just a moment before you were so loving towards your wife, and suddenly something clicks and you are no longer loving, and you are worried. Because you are linked, you have a slight memory, a remembrance of just a few minutes before.... You were so loving and flowing, and what happened? Suddenly the flow is not there, you are frozen. Maybe you were holding the hand of your wife and the mind has changed and another mind has come in.

The hand is in your hand, but suddenly energy is no longer flowing, now you want to leave the hand and escape from this woman. In fact you start thinking, ”What are you doing here? Why are you wasting your time with this woman? What has she got?” And you feel very much anxiety also, because just a moment before you were promising, ”I will love you for ever.” And you become worried because you think this is not right: ”Just a moment before I promised and I am already breaking the promise.” You are angry and you want to kill somebody, and just a few minutes later that anger is gone, you are no longer angry. You even start feeling compassion for the other person. You start feeling happy: ”It is good that I have not killed him.” Watch your mind and you will continuously find this shift; this gear goes on changing. Tantra says: There is a state of unity, when the bridge is no longer a small link but both the minds are really together. This togetherness is the real meeting of the man and the woman, because one part of the mind, the right mind, is feminine; the left mind is masculine. And when you are making love to a woman or a man, when the orgasm happens, both your minds come very close; that’s why the orgasm happens. It has nothing to do with the woman, it has nothing to do with anything outside. It is just inside you. Watch.... Tantrikas have been watching the phenomenon of love very deeply, because they think and they are right that the greatest phenomenon on earth is love, and the greatest experience of humanity is orgasm. So if there is some truth, that truth must be closer in the moment of orgasm than anywhere else. This is simple logic. One need not be very logical about it: it is such an obvious thing that this is man’s greatest joy, so this joy must somehow be opening a door to the infinite...maybe very slightly, very slowly, maybe just a part of it, but something of the infinite enters into it. For a moment the man and the woman are lost, they are no longer in their egos; their capsules disappear.

What happens exactly? You can ask the physiologists too... Tantra has discovered many things. A few: one, when you are making love to a woman and you feel orgasmic and happy, it has nothing to do with the woman; the whole thing is happening within you. It has nothing to do with the woman’s orgasm, they are not related at all.
When the woman is having her orgasm, she is having her orgasm; it has nothing to do with you. Maybe you just functioned as a trigger point, but the woman’s orgasm is her private orgasm, and your orgasm is your private orgasm. You both are together, but your orgasm is yours; and when you are having your orgasm your woman cannot share your joy. No, it is just absolutely yours. It is private. She can see something is happening on your face, in your body but that is just an observation from the outside. She cannot participate in it. When the woman is having her orgasm, you are just a spectator, you are no more a participant in it. And even if you both are having orgasms together, then too your orgasmic joy will not be more or less; it will not be affected by the orgasm of the woman, nor will the woman’s orgasm be affected by you. You are completely private, totally in yourself one thing. That means all orgasm, deep down, is masturbatory. The woman is just a help, an excuse; the man is a help, an excuse, but not a must.

The second thing that tantrikas have been watching is: when the orgasm is happening, it has nothing to with your sex centers, nothing to do with them, because if the sex centers are cut from the brain you will have orgasm but you will not have any joy. So, deep down, it is not happening at the sex center, it is happening in the brain. Something from the sex center is triggered in the brain, it is happening in the brain. And modern research perfectly agrees with it.

You must have heard the name of the famous psychologist, Delgado. He has devised small instruments...he puts electrodes in the head and those electrodes can be controlled by remote control. You can have a small box of remote control push buttons. You can keep the box in your pocket and any time you want to have a sexual orgasm, you just push a button. It will have nothing to do with your sex center; that button will just push something in your head. Inside the head it will push those centers which are pushed by sexual energy when it is released. It will push them directly and you will have a great orgasm. Or you can push another button and you will become immediately angry. Or you can push another button and you will fall into a deep depression. You can have all the buttons in the box and you can change your mood as you like. When Delgado experimented with his animals for the first time, particularly with mice, he was surprised. He fixed the electrode in his most favorite mouse, who was very well trained; he had been experimenting with him for many days, and a very intelligent mouse.... He fixed his electrode in his head and gave a box to the mouse and trained him to push the button. Once he knew that when the button is pushed he has a sexual orgasm, the mouse went mad. In one day, six thousand times.... He died, because he would not go anywhere. He would not eat, he would not sleep, he would ...he forgot everything. He was just going crazy pushing the button again and again and again. This modern research into the human brain says exactly what Tantra has been saying. First, the orgasm has nothing to do with the person outside, your woman, your man. Second, it has nothing to do with your sex energy. The woman triggers your sex energy, your sex energy triggers your brain energy; a brain center is triggered, but orgasm happens exactly there in the brain, in the head.

That’s why pornography has so much appeal, because pornography can directly stimulate your brain. A beautiful woman or an ugly woman has nothing to do with your orgasm; an ugly woman can give you as beautiful an orgasm as a beautiful woman. But why don’t you like the ugly woman? It does not appeal to the head, that’s all. Otherwise, as far as orgasm is concerned, both are as capable. The ugliest woman or the most beautiful woman, a Cleopatra, is immaterial. But your head, your brain, is more interested in the form, in the beauty. Tantra says, once we understand this whole mechanism of orgasm, a great understanding can arise. One step more: modern research agrees up to this point, that orgasm happens in the brain. The woman’s orgasm happens in the right side of the brain; about that modern research is not yet capable of saying something, but Tantra does. The woman’s orgasm happens in the right brain, because that is the feminine center; and the male orgasm happens in the left, that is the male brain. Tantra goes further into this work, and Tantra says when both these sides of the brain come together great joy arises, total orgasm happens. And these sides of the brain can come together very easily. The less analytic you are, the closer they are. That’s why an interpretative mind is never a happy mind. A noninterpretative mind is happier. Primitive people are more joyous than the so-called civilized, the educated, the cultured. Animals are happier than human beings, birds are happier; they don’t have the analytical mind. The analytical mind makes the gap bigger. The more you start thinking logically, the bigger is the gap between the two minds. The less you think logically, the closer they come. The more poetic, the more aesthetic is your approach, the more they will come close and the more possibility of joy, delight, celebration there will be.

And the last point, which I think will take many centuries for science to come to.... The last point is that the joy is not happening exactly in the brain either: it happens in the witness who is standing behind both these sides of the brain. Now if the witness is too much attached to the male mind, then the joy will not happen so much. Or if the witness is attached too much to the female mind, then joy will be a little more, but not so much. Can’t you see? women are happier creatures than men. That’s why they look more beautiful, more innocent, younger. They live long, they live more peacefully, more contentedly. They are not worried so much; they don’t commit suicide so much, they don’t go mad so much. The proportion is double: man goes twice as much man commits suicide twice as much, and in madness also. And all the wars, if you include them also in suicidal and murderous activities, then man has been doing nothing else. Down the centuries he has been preparing for war, killing people.

The feminine mind is more joyous because it is more poetic, more aesthetic, more intuitive. But if you are not attached to any part and you are just a witness, then your joy is utter, ultimate. This joy we have called anand, bliss. To know this witness is to become one, absolutely one; then the woman and the man in you disappear completely, then they are lost in oneness. Then orgasmicness is your moment-to-moment existence. And in that state, sex disappears automatically, because there is no need. When a person lives orgasmically twenty-four hours a day, what is the need?
In your witnessing you become orgasmic. Then orgasm is not a momentary thing, then it is your simple nature. This is what ecstasy is.

All those with minds deluded by interpretative thoughts Are in two minds And so discuss nothingness and compassion as two things.
Saraha says that the existence is nothingness. But don’t be worried: by ’nothingness’ we don’t mean that it is empty of everything. In fact we mean it is full; it is so full that we call it nothing. If we call it something that will make a demarcation, and it is unbounded, so we call it nothing. But Buddhists have been asked again and again: If it is nothing, then from where does the compassion come? Then why does Buddha talk about compassion? Saraha says: Nothingness and compassion are two aspects of the same energy. Nothingness, in existence, means: I have to be nonegoistic. Ego means: I am something. If existence is nothing and I have to go into participation with this existence, if I have to become part of this existence, I have to drop the ego. The ego is making me somebody, is giving me a definition, a limitation. When existence is without any self, it is nothingness, anatta. Then I have also to be a nothing; only then these two nothings will be capable of meeting with each other and dissolving into each other. I have to become a no-ego, and in that no-ego is compassion. With ego is passion, with no-ego is compassion. With ego there is violence, with no-ego there is love. With ego there is aggression, anger, cruelty; with no-ego there is kindness, sharing, affection. So Saraha says compassion has not to be cultivated. If you can live in nothingness, compassion will be flowing out of you of its own accord. I have heard....

A man went to his bank manager to ask for a loan. After he had taken particulars, the bank manager said, ”By rights I should refuse your request, but I will give you a sporting chance. Now... one of my eyes is made of glass; if you can tell me which one it is I will grant you the loan.” The customer looked at him intently for a few moments and then said, ”It is your right eye, sir.” ”That’s correct,” said the bank manager he could not believe it, how he had guessed it. He said, ”How did you guess?”
”Well,” replied the customer, ”it appeared to be more compassionate so I thought it must be a glass eye.” The ego, the calculating, cunning mind, is never compassionate, cannot be. In the very existence of the ego there is violence. If you are, you are violent. You cannot be nonviolent. If you want to be nonviolent, you will have to drop your I, you will have to become a nothingness. Out of nothingness is nonviolence. It is not a question of practicing it; it is a question of becoming nobody, then it flows. It is the block of the I that is blocking the flow of your energies; otherwise compassion is easy.

Saraha says: Nothingness and compassion are not two things. You be nothing and there will be compassion. Or you attain to compassion and you will find you have become nothing, a nobody. This characterization of existence as nothingness is a great step towards annihilation of the ego. And this is one of the greatest contributions of Buddha to the world. Other religions go on cultivating, in subtle ways, the same ego. The righteous person starts feeling, ”I am righteous”; the moralist thinks, ”I am more moral than others.” The man who practices religion thinks himself more religious than others. But these are all ego qualities, and these are not going to help, ultimately.

Buddha says cultivation is not the question, but understanding, awareness that there is nobody in you. Have you ever looked inside? Have you ever gone inside and looked around? Is there anybody? You will not find anybody; you will find silence, you will not come across anybody. Socrates says: Know thyself. And Buddha says: If you come to know, you will not find any ’thyself’; there is nobody inside, there is pure silence. You will not hit against any wall, and you will not come across any self. It is emptiness. It is as empty as existence itself. And out of that emptiness, everything is flowing; out of that nothingness, everything is flowing.
Bees know that in flowers Honey can be found. That samsara and nirvana are not two How will the deluded ever understand?

Have you watched it? Around a small, beautiful lake there are many flowers. Frogs may be sitting just by the roots of the flowers, but they don’t know that flowers have honey in them. Bees know that in flowers honey can be found. Waterfowl, swans, fish and frogs do not know, even when they are living just by the side of the plants. To know that flowers have honey, one has to become a bee. Saraha says the tantrika is like a bee and the ascetic is like a frog. He lives by the side of the flowers, and he is not at all aware. Not only is he not aware, he denies. He thinks bees are indulgent, that bees are fools, that they are destroying themselves. Saraha says ascetics are like frogs, and the tantrika is like a bee. In the phenomenon of sex there is hidden the sublime. In the energy of sex there is a key which can open the door of existence. But frogs will not know it. Tantra says it is such an obvious fact that out of sex energy life is born: that means that sex must be at the very core of life. Life comes through sex energy. A new child is born through sex energy, a new being enters into existence, a new guest comes into existence through sex energy. Sex energy is the most creative energy. Certainly, if we look deep into it we may find even greater, more creative possibilities of it. Tantra says: Sex is the lowest rung of the sex energy, of libido. If you enter into it with more awareness and you search into it deeply, you will find the highest possibility, samadhi, hidden in it. Sex is like samadhi fallen into the mud; it is like a diamond which has fallen into the mud. You clean the diamond, the mud cannot destroy it. The mud is only on the surface; you just wash the diamond and again it is shining with all its luster and all its glory.
In sex is hidden the diamond. In love is hidden God. When Jesus says God is love, he may have got this idea somewhere from Tantra, because the Jewish God is not love at all; it cannot come from the Jewish tradition. The Jewish God is a very angry God.

The Jewish God says, ”I am very jealous, I am very angry, and if you go against me, I will take revenge.” The Jewish God is a very dictatorial God. Love does not fit with the Jewish idea. From where did Jesus get this idea that God is love? Every possibility is that it came through the Tantric school of India, that it spread from the tantrikas.
Saraha was here three hundred years before Jesus. Who knows, maybe it was Saraha and Saraha’s idea which traveled. There are absolute reasons to think so. There is every possibility of Jesus’ coming to India, there is every possibility of messengers spreading from India towards Israel.

But one thing is certain, that it is Tantra which has looked at God as love energy. But Christians missed. Even Jesus has given the hint that God is love they have missed. They have interpreted it as God-loving; they missed it. Jesus is not saying God is loving, Jesus is saying God is love, God is equal to love. It is a formula: Love is equal to God. If you go deep into love you will find God, and there is no other way to find God. Bees know that in flowers Honey can be found. That samsara and nirvana are not two How will the deluded ever understand?
Who are these deluded people, these frogs? The ascetics, the so-called mahatmas, who go on denying the world because they say God is against the world. This is foolish! If God is against the world, then why does he go on creating it? He can simply stop it any moment if he is so against it. If he agreed with your mahatmas, then he would have stopped it long before. But he goes on creating. He does not seem to be against it, he seems to be absolutely for it.

Tantra says God is not against the world: samsara and nirvana are not two, they are one. The ascetic fights sex energy, and through that fighting he starts falling away from God, falling away from life, falling away from the vital source of life. And then there are perversions...bound to be. The more you fight with something, the more perverted you become. And then you start finding tricks, back doors to enter into it again. So the ascetic, on the surface, fights with sex, fights with life, and deep down starts fantasizing about it. The more he represses, the more he becomes obsessed with it; the ascetic is the obsessed person. The tantrika is a very natural person, he has no obsessions. But the irony is that the ascetic thinks that the tantrika is obsessed, the ascetic thinks that the tantrikas talk about sex ”Why do they talk about sex?” but the real obsession is in the ascetic. He does not talk about it or even if he talks about it he only talks to condemn it but he continuously thinks about it. His mind goes on reeling around and around it.
It is difficult to go against God. Even if you go, your failure is certain. Mind will find some way or other. I have heard....

A Jew was talking to a friend and said, ”I prefer to sleep alone; I believe in celibacy. In fact ever since we were married, my wife and I have had separate rooms.”
”But,” said the friend, ”supposing during the night you feel that you would like a little love, what do you do?” ”Oh,” replied the other, ”I just whistle.”
The friend was astonished, but went on to ask, ”But supposing it is the other way round and your wife feels that she would like a little loving what happens then?”
”Oh,” he replied, ”she comes to my door and taps, and when I answer she says, ’Ikey, did you whistle?’” Whether you stay in the same room or not, what does it matter? Mind will find some way the mind will start whistling. And the woman cannot whistle of course; she is expected not to be so vulgar as to whistle. But she can come and knock on the door and can ask, ”Ikey, did you whistle?” Mind is very cunning. But one thing is certain, you cannot escape the reality of life. If you try to escape, your cunning mind will find ways, and will become more cunning. And you will be more in the trap of the mind. I can’t see any ascetic ever realizing truth impossible. He denies life, how can he realize truth? Truth has to be alive, truth has to be with life, in life. That’s why to my sannyasins I never say leave life. I say be in life, be totally in it! There is the door, somewhere in the marketplace.

That samsara and nirvana are not two, says Saraha, how will the deluded ever understand? But the frogs? how will they ever understand? Become a bee!
Let this be a deep remembrance in you, at least for my sannyasins: Become a bee, don’t become a frog. These flowers of life are carrying the honey of God...collect!
When the deluded in a mirror look They see a face, not a reflection. So the mind that has truth denied Relies on that which is not true.

The mind is like a mirror: it only reflects. It can only give you a shadow experience, never the real, never the original. It is like a lake...and you can see the full moon in the lake reflected, but the reflection is not the real moon. And if you start thinking that the reflection is the real moon, you will never find the real moon. Says Saraha: When the deluded in a mirror look, they see a face, not a reflection. What is the difference in seeing a face and not a reflection? When you start seeing the face in the mirror, you are deluded; you are thinking, ”That is my face.” That is not your face, that is just the reflection of your face. In the mirror there can be no real face, only reflections.
Mind is a mirror! It reflects reality, but if you start believing in that reflection you are believing in untruth, in the image. And that very belief will become a barrier. Saraha says: If you want to know the truth, put the mind aside otherwise it will go on reflecting and you will go on looking at the reflection. Put the mind aside! If you really want to know the real, then go against the reflection.

For example, you see the full moon reflected in the lake. Now where are you going to seek the full moon? Are you going to take a jump into the lake? Are you going to dive deep into the lake to find the moon? Then you will never find it. You may even miss yourself. If you really want to see the real moon, then go against the reflection, just in the diametrically opposite direction then you will find the moon. Don’t go in the mind, go diametrically opposite to the mind.

Mind analyzes; you synthesize. Mind believes in logic; don’t believe in logic. Mind is very calculative, mind is very cunning; you be innocent. Go in the opposite direction! Mind asks for proofs, reasons; don’t ask for proofs and reasons. That is the meaning of trust: go in the opposite direction. Mind is a great doubter. If you doubt you go into the mind, if you don’t doubt you go against the mind. Doubt not! Life is to be lived, not to be doubted. Life is to be trusted. Go hand in hand with trust and you will find truth: go with doubt and you will go astray. The search for truth is the search in the opposite direction of the mind because mind is a mirror, it reflects. And to put the mind aside is what meditation is all about; to put the thoughts aside, thinking aside, mentation aside, is what meditation is all about.

When you can look into reality without thoughts reflecting it, truth is herenow; then you are truth and all is truth. Mind is the great faculty of delusion, illusion, of dreaming.
Though the fragrance of a flower cannot be touched, ’Tis all pervasive and at once perceptible. So by unpatterned being-in-itself Recognize the round of mystic circles.
A great sutra! Though the fragrance of a flower cannot be touched you cannot touch the fragrance of a flower it is all pervasive and at once perceptible...but you can smell it. You cannot see it but you can smell it, it surrounds you. You cannot touch it; it is not tangible, it is not touchable. And if you make tangibility the criterion of truth, then you will say it is not true. Truth is not thinkable. If you think, you will miss. Truth can be experienced, but cannot be known. Truth can be realized, but not concluded. Just as the fragrance of a flower cannot be seen by the eyes, cannot be heard by the ears.... If you make it a criterion, ”Unless I hear the smell I will not believe, unless I see the smell I will not believe,” then you are creating barriers and you will never come to know it. And by and by, if you don’t believe it, if you don’t believe at all, you will lose the faculty of smelling it because any faculty that is not used, not trusted, falls out of use, becomes by and by crippled. Trust is a faculty! You have been with doubt so long, married to doubt so long, that you say, ”I will first need rational proofs; I doubt.” So you remain with doubt, and truth can be known only through trust, just as fragrance can be known only by smell. It is there if you smell. If you trust, truth is there. Shraddha trust, faith, simply indicates one thing: that the faculty to know truth is not doubt, is not skepticism. If you insist on doubt, you remain with doubt.
It is all pervasive and at once perceptible.

With trust immediately it is there, at once! Not a single moment is lost. So by unpatterned being-in-itself.... And what is trust? I have never come across such a beautiful definition of trust: So by unpatterned beingin- itself.... Don’t pattern yourself! All patterning is a sort of armoring, all patterning is a sort of protection; all patterning is a way to avoid. Be open, don’t be patterned.

So by unpatterned being-in-itself.... If you are not patterned, if you are simply open, you don’t have any armor, you are not protecting yourself by logic, doubt, this and that, you are simply vulnerable...unpatterned, unprotected, under the open sky, all doors open.... Let friend or foe enter, anybody, but all doors are open. In that openness you are being-in-itself, you are in a state of suchness, you are empty, you are a nothingness, and you will recognize what truth is.
Recognize the round of mystic circles.

And then you will see that out of this suchness two circles are arising: one is of nirvana, another is of samsara. Two waves are arising in this ocean of suchness: one is of matter, another is of mind but both are waves, and you are beyond both. Now there is no division, no distinction. Truth is neither mind nor matter, truth is neither samsara nor nirvana, truth is neither unholy nor holy; all distinctions have disappeared. If you bring your mind to the ultimate reality, it will not allow you to see the ultimate reality. It will bring something of its own falsities with it.

I was reading one anecdote...meditate over it.
A man arrived at the pearly gates and on being asked his name replied, ”Charlie Graball.” ”I don’t think we have any notice of your coming,” he was informed. ”What was your occupation in earthly life?”

”Scrap-metal merchant,” the visitor said.
”Oh,” said the angel, ”I will go and inquire.” When he returned, Charlie Graball had disappeared. So had the pearly gates.
Charlie Graball, scrap-metal merchant...you carry your habits to the very end. Maybe mind is useful as far as the man-made world is concerned. Maybe mind is useful as far as thinking about matter is concerned. But to carry this mind to the innermost core of your reality is dangerous; it will disturb there.

Let me say it in this way: doubt is helpful in the world of science. In fact without doubt there would be no science; doubt is the very methodology of science. Because science has become so prevalent, has been so successful in the past, it seems that doubt has become the only methodology to inquire. So when you go in, you carry doubt that’s not right. When you are going outwards, doubt is helpful; when you are going inwards, doubt is a barrier. Trust, less and less doubt.... If you want to come in, doubt less and less and less, and let there be a moment when there is no doubt left. In that state of no-doubt, you will be at the center. If you want to know the outside world, trust will not be helpful.
That also has happened in the past in the East. We came to know the inner reality through trust, so we thought through trust we can create science also. We were never able to create science. In the East we could not create any great science nothing to say about it, nothing much. Because we entered inside with trust, so we thought trust was the only method to inquire that was fallacious. We tried trust on the outside objective things and we failed; the East has been a failure as far as science is concerned. The West has succeeded through doubt in science; now the same fallacy they think doubt is the only right, valid method to know. It is not. Now, if you try doubt in the inner world you will fail as certainly as the East has failed in scientific growth. Doubt is good about objects, trust is good about subjectivity. Doubt is good if you are moving further away from your center towards the periphery, trust is good if you are moving towards the center away from the periphery. Trust and doubt are like two wings.

The humanity that is going to be born in future will be capable of doubting and trusting both together. That will be the highest synthesis: the synthesis of East and West, the synthesis of science and religion. When a man is capable of doubting and trusting both...when doubt is needed, when he is going outwards, he doubts; and when trust is needed he puts the doubt aside and trusts. And a man who is capable of both will be beyond both, certainly beyond both, because he will use both and he will know that he is separate from both. That’s transcendence. That beyond-bothness is great freedom. Exactly that is what nirvana is: great freedom. Meditate on these sutras. Saraha is saying great things in simple words; he was showering his great insight on the king. You can also partake of this great insight. You can go very deep into human reality with Saraha. And always remember, that is the only way to go to the ultimate reality. The human reality is the only way to go to the ultimate reality, because that is where you are. One can proceed only from the place where one is. Sex is your reality, samadhi can be approached through it. Body is your reality, bodilessness can be approached through it. Outwardness is your reality, inwardness can be approached through it. Your eyes are looking outwards; they can be turned inwards.
Enough for today.

Be true to love

The first question:
Osho, I am a frog. I know I’m a frog because I like swimming in murky dark green water and hopping about in slimy mud. And what is honey anyway? If a frog can be in an unpatterned state of being, will it become a bee? Certainly! To be a bee is everybody’s possibility; everybody can grow into being a bee. An unpatterned, alive, spontaneous life, moment-to-moment life, is the gate to it, the key to it. If one can live not out of the past then one is a bee, and then there is honey all around.
I know it is difficult to explain this to a frog. The question is right: ”What is honey anyway?” The frog has never known about it. And he lives just at the root of the plant where flowers bloom and bees collect honey, but he has not moved in that dimension.

By ’frog’ Saraha means a person who lives out of the past, encaged in the past, in the memories. When you live through the past you only apparently live, you don’t really live. When you live through the past, you live like a mechanism, not like a man. When you live through the past, it is a repetition, it is a monotonous repetition; you miss the delight, the joy of life and existence. That’s what honey is: the joy of life, the sweetness of just being herenow, the sweetness of just being able to be. That joy is honey...and there are millions of flowers blooming all around, the whole existence is full of flowers.

If you know how to collect honey, if you know how to be joyful, you become an emperor; if you don’t know, you remain a beggar. These birds singing here...honey is showering! The bee will collect, the frog will miss. This sky, this sun, these people around you...everybody is carrying infinite sources of honey, everybody is flowing with sweetness and love. If you know how to collect it and how to taste it, it is all over the place God is all over the place. The taste of God is what Saraha calls honey.

The bee has a few things...and those have to be understood, and they are very dangerous things. One: the bee is never attached to any flower. That is the most profound secret: the bee is not attached to any flower. It has no nuclear family, no wife, no husband. It simply moves wherever any flower invites it. It has freedom. Man has become confined to the family. Tantra is very much against family, and the insight is great. Tantra says it is because of family that love has been completely damaged, that the sweetness of life has completely been poisoned. People are clinging to each other, people are trying to possess each other, not to enjoy but to possess. Possession has become the enjoyment. There has happened a great shift: you are with a woman not to enjoy her you are not enjoying her. You are with a man not to enjoy the man you are not enjoying at all but to possess. Politics has entered, ambition has entered, economics has entered...love is not there. Love knows no possession. I am not saying you cannot live with a woman for long you can live for lives together but there will be no family. By ’family’ I mean the legal possession; by ’family’ I mean the demand. The husband can demand from the wife, he can say, ”You are obliged to give me love!” Nobody is obliged to give anybody love. The husband can force the wife to love him. When you can force somebody to love, love disappears; then there is only pretension. Then the wife is fulfilling a duty, then the husband is fulfilling a duty. Duty is not love! Love is honey, duty is white sugar; you will suffer from diabetes sooner or later. It is poison, it is pure poison, white sugar. Yes, it tastes similar, a little bit like the honey, but it is not honey. The family is very possessive. The family is against man, it is against society, it is against universal brotherhood. The boundary of the family is your imprisonment. You may not feel it, because you have become accustomed to it.
Crossing the boundary of a country, have you not felt humiliated? Then you know that the country was not your country, it was a great prison. Getting out and coming in you will know: at the checking post, at the airport, you will know while passing through the customs that you are a prisoner. Freedom was bogus, just holy cow dung. But living in a country, if you don’t cross the boundary you will never know about it; you will think you are free. You are not free! Yes, the rope is big you can move around, but you are not free. And so is the case with the family. If you start crossing the boundary, then you will know you are imprisoned. If you start loving the neighbor then your family will be against you. If you are happy with some other woman, your wife is your enemy. If you are dancing with some other man, your husband is mad at you. He would like to kill you, and just the other day he was saying, ”I love you so much, I can die for you.” Just cross the boundary, and you will know that you are a prisoner. Never cross the boundary and you can live in blissful ignorance that everything is okay.

It is attachment, it is possessiveness that has destroyed your capacity to go to many flowers, to taste all the flowers. Just think of a bee collecting honey from just one flower that honey will not be very rich, the richness comes out of the variety. Your life is boring, it is not rich.

People come to me and they say, ”I am bored! What should I do?” They are doing everything to get bored and they are thinking as if boredom is happening from somewhere else. Now, you are living with a woman you don’t love anymore, but your scriptures say once you have promised, you have to fulfill the promise: be a man who keeps a promise. Once you are committed, you have to fulfill the commitment. Now if you are bored, nothing is surprising: love has disappeared! It is as if you are forced to eat the same thing every day how long will you be able to enjoy it? You may have enjoyed it on the first day, yes, the second day, the third day...but then it will start getting on your nerves. Then for ever and ever...! Then you will start getting bored. And because man is bored he invents a thousand and one ways to distract his mind: sits glued to the chair before the TV for six hours what stupidity or goes to the movie, or listens to the radio, or reads the newspaper, or goes to clubs where bored people just like you gather together. Somehow one is trying to distract oneself from the boredom that has happened out of the relationship.

Try to understand. Tantra says: Be a bee, be free! Tantra is not saying that if you love a woman then don’t be together with her. Be together with her, but the commitment is towards love, not towards the woman; the commitment is towards love, not towards the man. This is a basic difference: you are committed to love, you are committed to happiness. When love is disappearing, when happiness is gone, then say thank you and move. And such should be the case with everything in your life. If you are a doctor and you are bored with your job, then you should be capable of dropping it any moment, whatsoever the cost. With risk, life becomes adventure. But you think, ”Now I am forty, forty-five, and how can I drop out of the job? And it is going very well financially”...but spiritually, psychologically, you are dying! You are slowly committing suicide. Then it is perfectly okay if you want to destroy yourself and save the bank-balance, then it is perfectly okay. But the moment you feel that the job is no longer a satisfying job, drop out of it! This is the Tantra revolution. The moment you see that something is no longer appealing, has lost the quality of allurement, of enchantment, is no longer magnetic, then don’t cling to it. Then say, ”I am sorry.” Then feel grateful for the past, for all that has happened through the person, through the job, through anything, but remain open in the future. This is the meaning of being a bee. And Saraha says: Only the bee knows that each flower is full of honey. But I am not saying go to the opposite extreme. There are people who can go to the opposite extreme, and man is so stupid.... Just the other day I was reading about a commune in Germany: the Action Analysis Commune. Now there is a rule in their commune that you cannot sleep with the same woman two nights together. Now this is again foolish. It seems man is such an idiot that you cannot help him. If you sleep two nights consecutively with one woman, the commune throws you out.

Now the one extreme has proved wrong. This is another extreme...it will prove wrong! The first extreme was repressive: you have to sleep with the same woman for years, for your whole life, with the same man, not knowing why, why you continue. The society says so, the state says so, the priest and the politician say so: that on the stability of your nuclear family the whole society depends. This insane society depends on the insane family; the insane family is the unit, the brick, out of which this whole prison is made. Insane politicians depend on the insane family, insane religions depend on the insane family. They have been repressing you; they don’t allow you to move away from the woman or the man or the relationship. They say you have to be with it, otherwise you are a criminal, a sinner. They make you very afraid of hell and hellfire. Now, the opposite extreme, that you cannot stay with the same woman the next night again. This too is again repressive. If you want to be with her the next night also, then...? Then it will be repression. With the first, love disappeared and boredom entered. With the second, intimacy will disappear and you will feel very alienated, like an island. You will not feel your roots anywhere.
Tantra says: Just in the middle is the way. Be in that place, be with that person, be in that job where you are enjoying, otherwise change. If you can enjoy one woman for your whole life, it is beautiful, it is tremendously beautiful. You are fortunate, because then intimacy will grow, your roots will go into each other, your beings will become intertwined. By and by you will become one person, one soul, and that is a great experience, the highest peak of Tantra will be known through it! But this is not family, this is love affair. You have gone into the very depth of love.

Now this type of people, this A. A. Commune, these types of people are dangerous! They think they are doing something very great; they are simply reacting. The society has done something wrong, now they are reacting too much and going to the opposite extreme, which will be again wrong. Man has to be balanced somewhere first thing.
Second thing...Saraha says, ”unstructured, unpatterned state of being.” If you live through habit you cannot enjoy life because the habit is of the old. How can you enjoy the same thing again and again and again? Your mind remains the same; then there will be boredom. You can even change the woman and the man, but you are the same, so fifty percent is always the same. There will be boredom. So first Tantra says: Never get obsessed with any person, remain free of personalities. Second, Tantra says: Remain free of your past then you are a hundred percent free, like a bee. You can fly anywhere; nothing holds you, your freedom is utter.

Don’t persist in your past pattern. Try to be inventive, try to be innovative! Be an adventurer, a discoverer, enjoy life through new ways; find new ways to enjoy it. In fact go on finding new ways of doing the same old thing, but find new ways.

There are infinite possibilities.... You can come to the same experience from many doors, and each door will give you a different vision. Then life is rich; there is sweetness, there is joy, there is celebration that is what honey is. Don’t be confined in the pattern of a frog! Yes, the frog can hop a little, jump here and there...he cannot fly and cannot know that each flower is carry-ing divine fragrance. What Saraha means by honey is a poetic metaphor for God, that each being is carrying divinity.

People come to me and they say, ”We want to know God where is God?” Now the question is just absurd. Where is he not! You ask where he is; you must be dead blind. Can’t you see him, that only he is? In the tree and in the bird, in the animal, in the river, in the mountain, in man, in woman...he is everywhere. He has taken so many forms to surround you, to dance around you. From everywhere he is saying ”Hello!” and you don’t listen. From everywhere he is calling you. From everywhere he is inviting you: ”Come to me!” but you are somehow keeping your eyes closed; or you have got blinkers on, you don’t look anywhere. You just look in a very narrow way, in a very focused way. If you are looking for money you only look for money, then you don’t look anywhere else. If you are looking for power you look only for power and you don’t look anywhere else. And remember, God is not in money, because money is man-made and God cannot be man-made. When I say God is everywhere, remember those things have not to be included which man has made. God cannot be man-made. God is not in money; money is a very cunning invention of man. And God is not in power; that too is again a madness of man. Just the very idea to dominate somebody is insane. Just the very idea that, ”I should be in power and others should be powerless” is the idea of a madman, a destructive idea. God is not in politics and God is not in money and God is not in ambition, but God is everywhere where man has not destroyed him, where man has not created something of his own. This is one of the most difficult things in the modern world, because you are surrounded by too many man-made things. Can’t you just see the fact of it?

When you are sitting near a tree, it is easy to feel God. When you are sitting on an asphalt road...you can go on searching on the asphalt road, you will not find God. It is too hard. When you are in a modern city, just cement and concrete buildings all around...in the jungle of cement and concrete you will not feel God, because man-made things don’t grow. That is one of the problems: man-made things don’t grow. They are dead, they don’t have any life. God-made things grow. Even mountains grow! The Himalayas are still growing, still getting higher and higher. A tree grows, a child grows.

Man-made things don’t grow, even the greatest. Even a painting of a Picasso will never grow, so what to say about a cement, concrete building? Even the music of Beethoven will never grow, so what to say about technology, about man-made machines?
Watch! Wherever you see growth, there is God, because only God grows, nothing else. In everything only God grows. When a new leaf is coming in the tree, it is God coming out of the tree. When the bird is on the wing, it is God on the wing. When you see a small girl laughing or a small boy giggling, it is God giggling. When you see tears flowing from the eyes of a woman or a man, it is God crying.

Wherever you find aliveness, yes, there is God; listen carefully, come closer, feel carefully. Be cautious! you are on holy ground.
Tantra says: If you drop your blinkers...that’s what Tantra means by ’unpatterned life-style’. If you drop your blinkers, if you start opening your eyes as wide as they are destined to be, suddenly you will see that you can see in all directions. You have been befooled by the society to look only in certain directions; the society has converted you into a slave.
There is a great conspiracy.... Each small child is damaged; immediately, the moment he is born, the society starts damaging him. So before he becomes alert he is a slave and crippled, crippled in a thousand and one ways. When a person is crippled, he will have to depend on the family, on the society, on the state, on the government, on the police, on the army he will have to depend on a thousand and one things. And because of that dependence he will be a slave always, he will never become a free man. So the society cripples, cripples in such subtle ways. And you don’t know: before you are able to know anything, you are already crippled. Tantra says: Regain health! Undo whatsoever the society has done to you! By and by become alert and start undoing the impressions that society has forced upon you, and start living your life. It is your life, it is nobody else’s business, it is utterly your life. It is God’s gift to you, a personal gift to you, with your initials on it. You enjoy it, you live it! And even if you have to pay much for it, it is worth paying. Even if sometimes you have to pay for your life with your life, that too is perfectly good.

Tantra is very rebellious. It believes in a totally different kind of society, which will not be possessive, which will not be money-oriented, which will not be power-oriented. It believes in a different kind of family, which will not be possessive and which will not be life-negative. Our families are life-negative. A child is born and the whole family tries to kill all joy of life. Whenever the child is joyful, he is wrong; and whenever he is sad and long-faced and sitting in the corner, everything is okay. The father says, ”Good! Very good boy.” The mother is very happy because he is no trouble. Whenever the child is alive, there is danger, and everybody is trying to kill the joy of the child.
And basically all joy is related to sexuality. And the society and the family are so afraid of sex that they cannot allow the children to be sexually joyful and that is the base of all joy! It is very restrictive: the children are not allowed even to touch their genital organs, they cannot play with them. The father is afraid, the mother is afraid...everybody is afraid! Their fear comes from their own parents; they are neurotic.

Have you not seen? A child is playing with his genital organs and immediately everybody jumps on him: ”Stop! Don’t do that again!” And he is not doing anything...he is simply enjoying his body, and naturally the sex organs are the most sensitive, most alive, most pleasurable. Suddenly something is cut in the child. He becomes afraid. Something in his energy is blocked. Now whenever he feels happy he will feel guilty too; now guilt has been put inside him. And whenever he feels guilty he will feel that he is a sinner, he is doing something wrong. This is my observation of thousands of sannyasins: whenever they are happy, they start feeling guilty. They start looking for the parent who must be somewhere around, and who will say ”Stop! What are you doing?” Whenever they are sad, everything is okay. Sadness is accepted, misery is accepted; joy is denied. And the children are somehow prevented from knowing the joys of life. The father and mother are making love...children know it. They hear the sounds, sometimes they feel that it is happening, but they are not allowed to participate in it, not allowed even to be there. It is ugly, it is destructive. The children should participate. When the father and mother are making love, the children should play around; they should feel happy with father and mother making love.

They should know that love is a beautiful phenomenon, not anything ugly, nothing to be made private, nothing to hide, nothing to be kept secret. It is not a sin, it is a joy! And if the children can see their father and mother making love, thousands of sexual diseases will disappear from the world, because their joy will erupt. And they will feel respectful towards the father and the mother. Yes, one day they will also make love, and they will know that it is a great celebration. If they can see father and mother making love as if they are praying and meditating, there will be a great impact.

Tantra says that love should be made with such celebration, with such great religious awe, reverence, that the children can feel that something great is happening. Their joy will grow, and there will not be any guilt in their joy. This world can be tremendously happy, but this world is not happy. It is very rare to come across a happy man, very, very rare. And only the happy man is sane; the unhappy man is insane. Tantra has a different vision, a totally, radically different vision of life. You can become a bee, in freedom you become a bee. A slave, you are a frog; free, you are a bee.
Listen to the message of freedom. Get ready to be free of everything that creates bondage. You have to be alert and beware.

The second question:
Osho, I am a schoolmaster, a sort of watered-down mixture of priest, politician and scholar all that you abhor. Is there any hope for me? Also I am fifty-six. Had I best just live out the rest of this life in patience and hope for better luck next time?

No hope for the priest, for the politician, for the scholar, not even in the next life! But you can drop being a priest, being a politician, being a scholar any moment, and there is hope. But no hope for the priest, no hope for the politician, no hope for the scholar. I am absolute about that. Even in the next life or next to next never. I have never heard of any priest ever reaching nirvana, never heard about any politician ever meeting God, never heard about any scholar ever becoming aware, knowing, wise. No, it is not possible. The scholar believes in knowledge, not in knowing. Knowledge is from the outside, knowing is from the inside. The scholar trusts information: the information goes on collecting, it becomes a heavy load, but nothing grows inside. The inner reality remains the same, as ignorant as before.

The politician seeks power: it is an ego trip. And those who arrive are humble people, not egoists. Egoists never arrive; by their very egoism they cannot arrive. Ego is the greatest barrier between you and God, the only barrier. So the politician cannot come.

And the priest...the priest is very cunning. He is trying to become a mediator between you and God, and he has not known God at all. He is the most deceptive, the most fraudulent. He is doing the greatest crime a man can do: he is pretending that he knows God; not only that, but that he will make God available to you, that you come and follow him and he will take you to the ultimate. And he does not know anything of the ultimate! He may know the ritual, how to do the prayer, but he does not know the ultimate. How can he lead you? He is a blind man, and when the blind man leads the blind, they both fall into the ditch. No hope for the priest, no hope for the politician, no hope for the scholar, but there is hope, Anand Tejas, for you. The question is from Anand Tejas. There is hope for you, every hope for you. And it is not a question of age. You may be fifty-six, or seventy-six, or a hundred and six that doesn’t matter. It is not a question of age because it is not a question of time. To enter into eternity, any moment is as right as any other moment, because one enters herenow! How does it make any difference how old you are, fifty-six or sixteen? The sixteen-year-old has to enter right now and the fifty-six-year-old has to enter right now; both have to enter right now. And the sixteen years are not helpful, neither are fifty-six years helpful. There are different problems for both, that I know. When a sixteen-year-old young man wants to enter into meditation or into God his problem is different from that of a man who is fifty-six. What is the difference? if you weigh them finally, the difference is quantitative, not qualitative.

The sixteen-year-old has only sixteen years of past; in that way he is in a better situation than the man who is fifty-six; he has a fifty-six years past. He has a big load to drop, many attachments: fifty-six years of life, many experiences, much knowledge. The sixteen-year-old has not that much to drop. He has a little load, less luggage, a small suitcase just a small boy’s suitcase. The fifty-six-year-old has much luggage. This way the younger is in a better situation.

But there is another thing: the old man has no more future. A fifty-six-year-old, if he is going to be alive seventy years on the earth, has only fourteen years left no more future, no more imagination, no more dreaming. There is not much space. Death is coming. The sixteen-year-old has a long future, much imagination, many dreams. The past is small but the future is big for the young; for the old the past is big, the future is small. On the whole it is the same: it is seventy years, both have to drop seventy years. For the young, sixteen years in the past, the remaining years in the future: the future has also to be dropped as much as the past. So finally, in the final reckoning, there is no difference.
There is every hope for you, Anand Tejas. And because you have asked the question, the work has already started. You have become alert about your priest, politician, scholar that’s good. To become aware of a disease, to know what it is, is half the treatment.

And you have become a sannyasin, you have taken a step into the unknown already. If you are going to be with me, you will have to say goodbye to your priest, your politician, your scholar. But I feel confident that you can do it, otherwise you would not have even asked. You have felt that it is meaningless, all that you have been doing up to now is meaningless you have felt it. That feeling is of tremendous value. So I will not say just be patient and wait for the next life, no. I am never in favor of postponement; all postponement is dangerous and is very tricky. If you say, ”I will postpone in this life nothing can be done,” you are avoiding a situation. Everything can be done! You are simply pretending. And this is a trick to save yourself: ”Now what can be done? I am so old.” Even on the deathbed, at the last moment, the change can happen. Even when the person is dying, he can open his eye for a single moment...and the change can happen. He can drop the whole past before death comes in and he can die utterly fresh. And he is dying in a new way: he is dying as a sannyasin, he is dying in deep meditation. And to die in deep meditation is not to die at all, because he will be dying with full awareness of the deathless.
It can happen in a single moment! So please don’t postpone, don’t say: ”Had I best just live out the rest of this life in patience...?” No, you drop it right now. It is worthless! why carry it, why wait? And if you wait, the next life is not going to be any different. That’s why I say there is no hope for the priest and the politician and the scholar. The next life will start from where you end this life. Again the priest, again the politician, again the scholar. You will have the next life in continuity with this life. How is it going to be different? It will be the same wheel turning again.

And this time I am available to you. Who knows? next time I may not be available. This time, somehow, groping in the dark, you have stumbled upon me. Next time, one never knows.... This time you took fifty-six years to come to a man through whom revolution is possible. Who knows, next time you may become more burdened, certainly you will become more burdened the past life’s burden, and the next life’s burden.... You may take seventy years to come, or to find a master.
That’s why I say there is no hope for the politician and the priest and the scholar in the future either. But for you there is every hope, because you are not a priest and you are not a scholar and you are not a politician. How can you be? These are things that gather around, but the innermost core remains always free. Don’t think of yourself in terms of being a frog, be a bee!

The third question:
Osho, What role should charity play in the life of a sannyasin?
The question is not from a sannyasin, it is from Philip Martin. The first thing, Philip Martin: become a sannyasin. You should not ask questions about others, that is not gentlemanly; you should ask questions about yourself. Be a sannyasin and then ask. But the question is meaningful, so anyway I am going to answer it. And I have the feeling that sooner or later Philip Martin will be a sannyasin; even the question shows some leaning. First thing: all the religions of the world have emphasized charity, dhan, too much. And the reason is that man has always felt guilty with money. Charity has been preached so much to help man feel a little less guilty. You will be surprised: in old English there is a word ’gilt’ which means money. In German there is a word geld which means money, and ’gold’ is very close by! Guilt, gilt, geld, gold...somehow deep down a great guilt is involved in money.
Whenever you have money you feel guilty. And it is natural because so many people don’t have money how can you avoid guilt? Whenever you have money, you know somebody has become poorer because of you. Whenever you have money, you know somewhere somebody will be starving, and your bank balance goes on becoming bigger and bigger. Some child will not get the medicine needed to survive, some woman will not get the medicine; some poor man will die because he will not have food. How can you avoid these things? They will be there. The more you have money, the more these things will be there erupting in your consciousness; you will feel guilty. Charity is to unburden you from your guilt, so you say, ”I am doing something: I am going to open a hospital, going to open a college. I give money to this charity fund, to that trust....” You feel a little happier. The world has lived in poverty, the world has lived in scarcity. Ninety-nine percent of people have lived a poor life, almost starving and dying, and only one percent of people have lived with richness, with money: they have always felt guilty. To help them the religions developed the idea of charity.

It is to rid them of their guilt. So the first thing I would like to say is: Charity is not a virtue, it is just a help to keep your sanity intact; otherwise you will go insane. Charity is not a virtue, it is not a punya; it is not that you have done something good when you do charity. It is only that you repent for all the bad that you have done in accumulating the money. To me charity is not a great quality, it is repentance, you are repenting. One hundred rupees you have earned, ten rupees you give in charity, it is a repentance. You feel a little good, you don’t feel that bad; your ego feels a little more protected. You can say to God, ”Not only was I exploiting, I was also helping poor people.” But what type of help is this? On one hand you snatch one hundred rupees, and on the other hand you give ten rupees not even the interest!

This is a trick that was invented by the so-called religious people, to help not the poor but the rich. Let it be absolutely clear, this is my attitude: it has been a trick to help the rich, not the poor. If the poor were helped, that was just a consequence of it, a by-product, but that was not the goal of it. What do I say to my sannyasins? I don’t talk about charity; that word seems ugly to me. I talk about sharing, and with a totally different quality in it. Sharing...if you have, you share, not because by sharing you will be helping others, no, but by sharing you will be growing. The more you share, the more you grow. And the more you share, the more you have, whatsoever it is. It is not only a question of money: if you have knowledge, share it; if you have meditation, share it; if you have love, share it. Whatsoever you have, share it, spread it all over; let it spread like the fragrance of a flower going to the winds. It has nothing to do particularly with poor people; share with anybody that is available...and there are different types of poor people. A rich man may be poor because he has never known any love share love with him. A poor man may have known love but has not known good food share food with him. A rich man may have everything and has no understanding share your understanding with him; he is also poor. There are a thousand and one types of poverty. Whatsoever you have, share it.

But remember: I am not saying that this is a virtue and God is going to give you a special place in heaven, that you will be specially treated, that you will be thought a VIP, no. By sharing herenow you will be happier. A hoarder is never a happy man. A hoarder is basically constipated. He goes on hoarding; he cannot relax, he cannot give. He goes on hoarding; whatsoever he gets, he simply hoards it. He never enjoys it, because even in enjoying it you have to share it, because all enjoyment is a sort of sharing. If you want to really enjoy your food, you will have to call friends. If you really want to enjoy food, you will have to invite guests; otherwise you will not be able to enjoy it. If you really want to enjoy drinking, how can you enjoy it alone in your room? You will have to find friends, other drunkards you will have to share! Joy is always a sharing. Joy does not exist alone.
How can you be happy alone? absolutely alone. Think! How can you be happy, absolutely alone? No, joy is a relationship, it is a togetherness. In fact even those people who have moved to the mountains and have lived an alone life, they also share with existence. Not alone...they share with the stars and the mountains and the birds and the trees, they are not alone.
Just think: for twelve years Mahavira was standing in the jungles alone, but he was not alone. I say to you, on authority, he was not alone. The birds were coming and playing around, and the animals would come and sit around, and the trees would shower their flowers on him, and the stars would come, and the sun would rise. And the day and the night, and summer and winter...and the whole year around...it was joy! Yes, he was away from human beings he had to be, because human beings had done so much damage to him that he needed to be away from them so that he could be healed. It was just to avoid human beings for a certain period so they didn’t go on damaging him. That’s why sannyasins have moved sometimes into aloneness, just to heal their wounds; otherwise people will go on poking their knives into your wounds and they will keep them green, they will not allow you to heal, they will not give you a chance to undo what they have done.

For twelve years Mahavira was silent, standing, sitting, with the rocks and the trees, but he was not alone, he was crowded by the whole existence. The whole existence was merging upon him. Then the day came when he was healed, his wounds cured, and now he knew nobody could harm him. He had gone beyond. No human being could hurt him any more. He came back to relate to human beings, to share the joy that he had attained there. Jaina scriptures talk only about the fact that he left the world, they don’t talk about the fact that he came back into the world. That is only half the story, that is not the full story. Buddha went into the forest, but he came back. How can you go on being there when you have it? You will have to come back and share it. Yes, it is good to share with trees, but trees cannot understand that much. They are very dumb. It is good to share with animals, they are beautiful. But the beauty of a human dialogue, it is impossible to find anywhere else; the response, the human response! They had to come back to the world, to human beings, to share their joy, their bliss, their ecstasy.

’Charity’ is not a good word, it is a very loaded word. I talk about sharing. To my sannyasins I say, share. In the word charity there is some ugliness also; it seems that you are having the upper hand and the other is lower than you, that the other is a beggar; that you are helping the other, that he is in need. That is not good. To look at the other as if he is lower than you, you have and he has not, is not good; it is inhuman. Sharing gives a totally different perspective. It is not a question of whether the other has or not, the question is that you have got too much, you have to share. When you give charity, you expect the other to thank you. When you share, you thank him that he allowed you to pour your energy, which was getting too much upon you. It was getting heavy, you feel grateful.
Sharing is out of your abundance. Charity is for others’ poverty, sharing is out of your richness. There is a qualitative difference.
No, I don’t talk about charity, but sharing. Share! Whatsoever you have, share...and it will grow. That is a fundamental law: the more you give, the more you get. Never be a miser in giving.

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