Freehab – turning to reality to overcome the debilitative effects of thinking one can live free in an unfree world. Turning oneself in is turning oneself out. - FUNKTIONARY

According to FUNKTIONARY:

Freehab – turning to reality to overcome the debilitative effects of thinking one can live free in an unfree world. Turning oneself in is turning oneself out. He spent six weeks in freehab and upon release turned State’s evidence against truth in the court of reality. In Freehab, you first stop questioning and second-guessing what your inner voice speaks to your Third-Ear. You start living your answers, answering the call to living authentically as the True Self—life lived from the Top Shelf. It’s through bouts of Freedom Binges on which our true happiness hinges. (See: Behindflight, Inner Voice & Third-Door)

Unsight – psychological blindness. People only see what they want to see, and when they see more than they want to see, they don’t see anything at all. - FUNKTIONARY

According to FUNKTIONARY:

Unsight – psychological blindness. People only see what they want to see, and when they see more than they want to see, they don’t see anything at all. Anything we take to be unsightly arises from our collective unsight—you being the collective anger and blind ignorance of the unsight-seeing. Just because you cannot see something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, likewise, just because you cannot find it or perceive it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t persist. I see you almost daily, disguised in different dress, conveying what you’ve learned (so small) as though chosen and somehow seemingly blessed. The illusions of truth should raise if not highlight the issue of what we understand about reality’s nature and as equally important, how we arrive at that understanding. (See: Identification, BLYND, Unseen, Core Beliefs, OZ & Unseeing, Tradition, First Eye, Single Eye, Pineal Gland & Dogma)

Doc Blynd Asks: 'Are You Living in Reality (dynamically in real life) or in Truth (static, predictable, certain, artificial life)?' “Cementality" Defined in FUNKTIONARY

According to FUNKTIONARY:

cementality – the non-intuitive and unwise state of mind and approach to Life wherein one attempts to set one’s position unshakably firm (cemented) as soon as possible into a conviction, and then defends any given position(s) against any reality (changes) to these positions with fanatical vim and fervent vigor. People who live in truth (and not reality) function with a cementality. But, since we live in reality (dynamically in real life) and not in truth (static, predictable, certain, artificial life) we must take and make provisional action decisions for this time, now; keeping an open mind by suspending belief and disbelief. Living in reality allows one’s position(s) to gradually evolve (morph) based on learning (and unlearning) from day-to-day testing, i.e., personal experience, per se—evolving from absolute truth to objective truth to subjective truth to reality-based truth. (See: Absolute Truth, Objective Truth, Subjective Truth, Reality Boxes, Truth-Based Truth, Believing, Academented, Ideology, Spontaneity, I-Concept, Split-Mind, Whole-Mind, Attachment, Consciousness, Neuralasticity, Indoctrination, Cultural Conditioning & Reality-Based Truth)

Disbelief: the ability to discern truth from among falsehood and lies, reality from truth, substance over symbol, realities over granfalloons, inherent spirituality over Corporate religion-FUNKTIONARY

According to FUNKTIONARY:

disbelief – a natural effect or a subconscious effect, of having a functioning critical mental faculty. The critical mental faculty is the ability to discern truth from among falsehood and lies, reality from truth, substance over symbol, realities over granfalloons, danger in the apparent midst of “peace,” inherent spirituality over Corporate religion, inherent rights over adherent rights, etc. 2) a mental state where reasoning has not been transcended. 3) when our perceptions of what actually exists misrepresents (do not agree or align with) what actually exists. Disbelief is the faculty that causes a rabbit for instance to refuse to cross a meadow to get a drink. Although the meadow looks peaceful and safe, it can’t believe it actually is safe; it may be under surveillance by a hawk or a hunter. Disbelief is when something we believe should exist does not agree with our perceptions of what actually exists. Disbelief can be shocking but awe-full (full of awe) and, is the key to the door of disillusionment which is the threshold of enlightenment—the porch of paradise. (See: “Paranoid,” Granfalloons, Belief Systems, Reification, Atheism, Agnosticism, Theology, Knowingness, Convictions, Core Beliefs, Predictive Programming, Political Power, Iron Rule, Techgnosis, Unrealized Man, Psychological Reversal, Belief & Faith)

'Man is absolutely unaware of his own being. He tries to know everything else except his own self. He thinks as if he knows himself. And that is the most fundamental mistake one can commit' - OSHO

‘To be "Born Again" means to attain a different vision, a different way of seeing. It is not a question of changing the objects, the seen. The whole thing depends on the change in the seer' - OSHO

Zen: The Special Transmission

The Bird Has Flown - OSHO Rajineesh

A MONK WAS RECITING THE DIAMOND SUTRA: ”... IF ONE SEES THAT FORMS ARE NOT FORMS, HE THEN SEES BUDDHA.”

THE MASTER WAS PASSING BY AND HEARD IT. HE THEN SAID TO THE MONK ”YOU RECITE WRONGLY. IT GOES LIKE THIS: ”IF ONE sees THAT FORMS ARE FORMS, HE THEN SEES BUDDHA.’”

THE MONK EXCLAIMED, ”WHAT YOU HAVE SAID IS JUST THE OPPOSITE TO THE WORDS OF THE SUTRA!”

THE MASTER THEN REPLIED, ”HOW CAN A BLIND MAN READ THE SUTRA?”

IT IS ONE OF THE MOST VERY PREGNANT ZEN ANECDOTES. The Zen approach towards life is not of knowing but of being. Truth is not a question of knowing, it is a question of being. It is not something that you can accumulate from others, from scriptures, from traditions. It is not information: it is transformation. You have to come to a totally new birth. You have to die as you are and you have to be reborn.

Jesus says to Nicodemus, ”Unless you are born again you shall not enter into my kingdom of God.” Nicodemus was a rabbi, a famous scholar, a very respected professor of religion, theology, philosophy, much more known than Jesus He could not understand what Jesus means: ”Unless you are born again...” He said, ”That means I have to wait for another life? It cannot happen in this life. He missed the whole point. Jesus is not saying that you have to wait for another life; he is saying that you have to attain a different vision, a different way of seeing. It is not a question of changing the objects, the seen. The whole thing depends on the change in the seer.

The knowledgeable person goes on feeding his memory with beautiful words, theories, ideologies, in the hope that by accumulating all these treasures he is coming closer to truth, to Tao, to God. In fact, just the contrary is happening: he is going farther and farther away from truth because the more the memory becomes thick, the more his knowledgeability becomes strengthened; there will be a China Wall between himself and that which is.

To know that which is, one does not need information, one needs clarity. And information always creates confusion, because information comes from many sources which are confusing and contradictory; they are bound to be so.

This is one of the most important problems contemporary man is facing today. It has never been so acute as it is today, because the world has become a small village and all the sources of knowledge have become available to everybody. Now everybody knows something about Judaism, Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Mohammedanism, communism. And all these different sources go on accumulating inside you contradictory information. You become a contradiction, a living contradiction. You become confusion. You don’t know where you are; you don’t know what is right and what is wrong.

All that you can do is find out into this mess of your mind something which seems more valid, more probable, more possible than other informations. But that is very tentative, hypothetical. Today you may decide Christianity is right because you know more about Christianity than you know about Buddhism. Tomorrow you may come to know more about Buddhism, and suddenly your Christianity starts evaporating. But your Buddhism is also in the same trap. some day you may come to know about Jainism, and then your Buddhism gives way. These are all sandcastles. You cannot live in them.

Hence the modern man has become very much confused: more knowledge, more confusion.

Zen insists that shift the whole consciousness from knowing to being. The question is not how much you know, the question is how much you are. The question is not about your memory but about your integrity. The question is not about your mind but about your consciousness, about your awareness. A man can go on reciting beautiful sutras in his sleep; it cannot help him in any way. In fact, it will help him only to fall asleep deeper because he will be thinking that now there is no need to wake up.

Always remember, the last trick of the mind is to give you the illusion that you are awake. That is the last strategy. One can dream in a dream that one is awake; then all possibility of waking up is finished. There is no need to wake up – you are already awake. That’s what you are dreaming.

That’s what actually goes on happening to the scholars – repeat beautiful words of Buddha, Jesus, Zarathustra, Lao Tzu. But when Buddha says something it has a totally different significance, because it comes from his experience, it is rooted in his being. It is alive! It is a rose flower still on the rosebush. The juice from the roots is still flowing towards the flower. When you repeat the same sutra it is only a plastic flower, because there is no experience within your being to support it, to nourish it, to feed it. It is just imposed from the outside.

Buddha was not repeating any ancient sutra; he was simply saying it on his own authority. And remember the difference: he was not authoritative. The scholar is authoritative. Buddha was speaking simply on his own authority; he is not authoritative. All that he is saying is, ”This is what I have experienced, this is my experience. Whether scriptures support it or not is quite irrelevant. Even if all the scriptures of the world are against it, it doesn’t matter a bit. Still it is true, because I have known myself.” It has a certain inner validity, a self-evidence about it.

Words can be mere words if you are repeating them and you are not the source of their origin. They look exactly like Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, but that is only the surface. The container is the same, but where is the content? The content comes from experience. They are like corpses. When you repeat a sutra, a tremendously significant statement of Buddha or Jesus, you are just carrying a corpse; the soul is no more in it. You are carrying only the cage; the bird has flown away. The cage may be beautiful in itself: it may be golden, studded with diamonds, very valuable. But where is the living bird, the bird who can sing, the bird who is alive? The bird is dead. Or maybe you have placed inside just a toy which looks like the bird, which pretends even to sing; it can have a hidden gramophone record in it, but still there is no life.

Once a drunkard was coming home from his pub. Before he went to the pub he thought that ”The night is very dark and when I will be coming back it will be late and I will be very much drunk, so it is better to take a lamp with myself.” So he carried a lamp. And when he fell almost on the floor in the middle of the night he became a little bit alert that ”Now it is time to go back home.” Everybody had already left. The owner is waiting for him to leave so that he can close the shop.

So he took his lamp. But he was very much puzzled: on the way he started stumbling. He stumbled with a buffalo, then with a donkey, then with a tree. He looked again and again at his lamp: What is the matter? He is carrying the lamp – why he is stumbling? Finally he fell by the side of the street. In the morning he was carried home by some friends.

In the middle of the day the owner of the pub came and said, ”Please return my cage. Instead of taking your lamp you have carried my parrot!”

Then he looked... But when a man is drunk it is bound to happen.

You are reading the Bible, but are you meditative enough to understand the message of Jesus?

Once I was invited by the biggest college in the East which prepares Christian missionaries, Leonard Theological College – a six-years course to prepare missionaries. Thousands of missionaries it has prepared, and every year hundreds of people pass through the examinations and they become missionaries. I went to look around; the principal was showing me everything. I asked him, ”Do you teach these people any kind of meditation?”

He said, ”Meditation? For what? We are preparing missionaries! We teach them the Bible, how to interpret it, how to support it by logical arguments, by proof – because the world is turning atheistic – how to argue against pagan religions which are not true religions, how to prove that Christianity is the only true religion and Christ the only-begotten son of God. Meditation is not needed; they need scholarship. And these six years we devote for great scholarship.” And they had a very huge library.

And I went around, and they were teaching every kind of thing – it looked so silly. In one class I saw the professor was teaching the would-be missionaries how to deliver a sermon: how to stand, how to make gestures by the hands, where to give a pause, where to speak slowly and where to shout loudly, where you have to hit on the table with your fist to emphasize the point...

I told to the principal that ”You are preparing actors, not missionaries. You are not preparing Christians. Can you tell me where Jesus was prepared, in what kind of college, what lessons he took in eloquence, where he learned how to deliver the Sermon on the Mount – how to stand, how to speak, what words to emphasize?”

The principal said, ”He never learned anything.”

I said, ”Then the difference is clear. The words that came to him came out of his experience, and these poor, stupid people that you are preparing, they will simply be repeating like parrots. Jesus won’t be in their hearts. The experience is missing; they won’t have any authenticity. When you have something to say, the very experience finds its own way of expression. When you have something to say it finds its own way; it finds the words, the gestures. But you can learn the gestures. and the words; that does not mean that you will find the experience. If there is experience there is expression, not vice versa.

”You are preparing parrots. You are making these people more stupid than they would have come here And what they are doing is so silly that only very mediocre people can do such kinds of things.”

But that’s what goes on happening all over the world.

Religion has nothing to do with words; it has something to do with realization. And if you realize, words automatically happen When your heart is full with a song you start finding the words. You start finding the right language, or whatsoever language you use becomes the right language and whatsoever words you use become significant.

Jesus is not a great scholar; he uses very ordinary words, day-to-day words, the language of the common people, of the marketplace, of the laborers, farmers, gardeners, fishermen, woodcutters, beggars, prostitutes, gamblers, drunkards. He is not a scholar, but nobody has spoken so beautifully. His words have such tremendous quality, such immense magic. Yes, it can only be called magic for the simple reason that they are alive.

You don’t know any rabbi’s name who was part in the conspiracy to crucify Jesus. All those great scholars have been forgotten. And this young man, the son of a carpenter, has still tremendous import, for the simple reason that his words have some truth in them. They are not only empty containers; there is some content.

ZEN SAYS: RIGHT WORDS, even right words, in the wrong hands become wrong, and vice versa. Even wrong words in the right hands become right. It is the magic of the person, it is the charisma of the experienced. awakened man that whatsoever he touches becomes gold; even dust becomes divine. In the hands of those who are fast asleep even gold is not gold.

This is something to be remembered. Then these small parables will start revealing great treasures to you. Words we can use, but the meaning will come from our own experience.

A hillbilly dragged his protesting son to a new school that had just opened in a nearby township. On arrival at the school the hillbilly Dad asked the teacher, ”What kind of learning are you a-teachifying?”

The teacher replied, ”Well, all the usual subjects. Reading, writing, arithmetic . . ” The earnest Dad interrupted him, ”What is this here arith... arith... what you said?”

”Arithmetic, sir,” repeated the teacher. ”I shall be giving a full course of geometry, algebra, trigonometry...”

”Triggemometry!” cried the hillbilly. ”Dang me! That’s just that what my boy needs – he is the worsest shot in the family!”

It is bound to be so. The moment a word reaches to you it immediately changes its meaning. It becomes your word, it takes your color.

The teacher asks her class who invented the bulb.

Everybody shouts, ”Edison!” except for Pierino who shouts, ”My father, my father!”

The teacher, perplexed, asks, ”Your father, Pierino? What do you mean?”

”Well,” replies the little boy, ”every night in bed my father says to my mother, ’Switch off the bulb, and we will do another one!’”

The boy can have his own meaning, he can only have his own meaning. It is natural. You can hear great words. but from where you are going to give the meaning to those words?

Just the other day Mutribo has asked me: ”Osho, did you hear about the Polack woodworm?”

Yes, Mutribo, he was found in a brick! A Polack woodworm, one thing is certain, cannot be found in wood. A Polack is a Polack! And the same is true about everybody.

Visiting the Russian gallows, the American ambassador was shocked by the horrid cries of the executed. He immediately ordered a modern electric chair to be delivered from the States, as a gift from the American people.

Paying another visit to the gallows a few months later, he was alarmed, when he heard far worse cries than he had heard on his previous visit. ”What is going on?” he inquired.

The commissar said, ”We received the electric chair, thank you, but we have no electricity... so we have to use candles.”

A MONK WAS RECITING THE DIAMOND SUTRA.

THE DIAMOND SUTRA is certainly one of the most valuable treasures ever handed over to humanity. It is certainly the most precious scripture, hence the name ”The Diamond Sutra”. The name has also been given to it because a diamond cuts everything, and the Diamond Sutra cuts your sleep, your dreams, your projections, your desires, your mind, all your stupidity, like a diamond. It goes like a sword inside you, cutting all the layers, cutting all that you have accumulated in millions of lives. It makes your own innermost core again available to you. But it is not for reciting.

That’s what Buddhists have been doing for twenty-five centuries: they go on reciting it. They have recited it so many times that there are millions of Buddhists all over the world who can recite the whole Diamond Sutra just by memory. There is no need for them to look into the book; they can recite it with closed eyes. But reciting is not going to help; in fact, it is going to hinder your progress, your growth, because reciting is a kind of autohypnosis. If you recite a certain sutra again and again and again it creates a deep sleep in you.

Hypnosis comes from a word hypnos; hypnos means deliberate sleep, created sleep. And it has been found that if you repeat a certain word or a certain mantra again and again it helps you to fall into deep sleep – a very refreshing sleep of course, rejuvenating sleep of course – but a sleep is a sleep; it is not awakening. And you will feel good: after you have done Transcendental Meditation for fifteen minutes, you will feel good. There is no doubt about it, because for fifteen minutes the mind stops all other kinds of chattering, because this is one of the laws of mind, that it can repeat only one thing at a time. If you repeat a certain mantra or sutra fast enough and you don’t give gaps between, then the mind cannot do anything else. You can go on repeating, ”Ram, Ram, Ram...” anything will do. You can repeat your own name and that will do. It has nothing to do with any sacred name or any holy mantra. There is no need to get it from anybody; you can invent your own mantra. Anything will do – abracadabra – just repeat it. The whole point is: constant repetition, and fast, because if you give gaps then your mind starts chattering. If you say, ”Ram...” and then you pause, in that pause the mind will think, ”The train is passing... somebody is crying... the ant is crawling on the foot... I wonder what time it is...” and thousand and one things. But if you don’t give any time, if you repeat in such a way that one Ram starts overlapping another Ram, then it will create a very soothing sleep in you.

It can be done by any kind of repetition, not just that of a word. You can hang a pendulum and you can look at the moving pendulum, from right to left, from left to right. Just watching the pendulum move continuously, within a few minutes you will be fast asleep. You will fall into a deep sleep which will be deeper than your ordinary sleep, because your ordinary sleep continues to have dreams. This deliberately created sleep takes you deeper than ordinary sleep; even dreaming stops.

And if you have been repeating the mantra for many years you will fall asleep, but the mantra has become now almost autonomous. It will go on repeating, reverberating inside you, ”Ram, Ram”; you will go on hearing it. First you repeat it; after a few months or years you start hearing the mantra being repeated. Your mechanism takes it over. Mind has a robot part which always takes things over.

You start learning driving. First you have to be alert about everything You have to be alert about the accelerator and the brakes and the clutch and the gearbox and the road and people passing by – and there are a thousand and one things. And you are really trembling Inside that whether you are going to make it or not because so many things are happening together, will you be able to manage to remember all the things? If you look at the road you forget the brake; if you concentrate on the brake you forget the accelerator; if you watch the accelerator, the road is forgotten.

But after a few days there will be no need to remember anything. You can go on singing a song or discussing, talking, listening to the radio, smoking or whatsoever you want, or thinking a thousand and one thoughts – and your robot part has taken over. Now your mind will be needed only in emergencies. If suddenly a car comes in front of you and it is a question of life and death, then your mind will come in; you will become aware. The robot part cannot function any more because you cannot prepare the robot part for emergencies. You cannot prepare it for accidents, so it has no idea how to deal with an accident. So only once in a while your consciousness will be there, otherwise the whole thing will go on unconscious.

This robot part goes on taking everything that you learn. And if you recite a mantra or a sutra for years, the robot part learns it. Then you fall asleep, but the robot part goes on repeating it on your behalf, and you go on thinking that you have not been asleep. You have been reciting the sutra, how can you be asleep? You have been doing your mantra, how can you be asleep? And there seems to be some logic in it, some reasoning in it.

Many Transcendental Meditators have told me that ”You say that we fall into sleep, but we go on repeating the mantra!” That is true. You go on repeating the mantra because now you don’t need to be there to repeat the mantra; the robot part of the mind repeats it. The robot part goes on doing many things for you. Who circulates your blood? You? If you have to circulate the blood you would have died long before... because you see a beautiful woman passing by and you forget to circulate the blood! And by the time you remember, it is finished! Who breathes? You? It is the robot part, otherwise who will breathe when you are asleep? Even in a coma you will continue to breathe.

Once I went to see a woman who has been in a coma for nine months, still breathing, perfectly breathing. The robot part continues to do it.

You will be surprised to know that the robot part becomes so capable of doing things that even when you die the robot part continues to do a few things. What to say about sleep? If you dig a grave just one month or two months after the man has been buried you will be surprised: his hairs have grown, his nails have grown. And the man is dead! Who managed it? How his hairs and nails have grown? The robot part has become so autonomous that it has not heard yet about the death of the man. Unless everything withers away into the earth it will continue, it will go on doing its job. It is a mechanical thing – whether you are in the room or not, your clock will go on functioning – just like the clock!

So you will feel that you have been repeating, so you were not asleep – that is absolutely wrong. You have been absolutely asleep. But the robot part is within you; It repeats so you can hear the vibration. And when you go into sleep you go hearing it and when you come out of sleep you come out hearing it. And the gap between the two you cannot remember because you were asleep, so you think that you have been hearing all along.

For centuries millions of religious people have been deceiving themselves by autohypnosis. Ninety- nine percent of your religion consists of autohypnosis and nothing else. Once that is dropped, then you will be able to discover true religion, not before it.

A MONK WAS RECITING THE DIAMOND SUTRA...

Reciting has become such a ritual. The very word ”koran” means reciting – the very word ”koran” means reciting, as if it is meant only to recite. Nobody even bothers to understand the meaning of it.

I know many Mohammedan friends who can recite Koran without knowing exactly the meaning; they are not concerned about the meaning. I know Jain friends who can recite Kundkund Samayasar without knowing the meaning. And I know Buddhists, monks and nuns, who can recite the Diamond Sutra, the Lotus Sutra, without knowing the meaning at all. And even if they know the meaning it is going to be wrong. It is going to be wrong because they are wrong. The meaning depends on their being. The meaning can be right only if they attain to Buddhahood; it can never be right before that. The Diamond Sutra says, and the monk was reciting

”... IF ONE SEES THAT FORMS ARE NOT FORMS, HE THEN SEES BUDDHA.”

THE PATH OF BUDDHA is the path of neti-neti, via negativa, neither this nor that. This is his whole process of reaching to your essential core. You have to go on discarding, eliminating. You have to say that ”The body is not myself, I am not the body, because I can see the body, I can feel the body.” You have been a child and you knew your body was a child’s body. Then you became young and you know that your body became young. Then you became old and you know your body became old. Sometimes you have been ill and sometimes you have been healthy, and you know an inner feel of health, well-being, illness.

You are the knower and the knower can never be the known; that is the arithmetic of via negativa. The observer cannot be the observed. So ”I am not the body” – that has to be the first experience when you enter inside. The first hang-up is with the body, so you have to disconnect yourself with the body. That is your first identity that ”I am the body.”

When you are hungry you say, ”I am hungry,” but really the case is different. You are only observing that the body is hungry, your stomach is feeling empty; that is your experience. You are not hungry. And when you eat and you are satiated, that too is your experience. You are the watcher; the food does not enter consciousness, neither the consciousness becomes ever hungry or satiated, neither it becomes thirsty or quenched. It is only an observer.

Buddha has said, ”Watch and disconnect yourself from the body. You are not the body.”

And the same has to be done with the mind. Then watch again – are you the thoughts? How can you be the thoughts? Thoughts come and go – and you abide. Thoughts are like reflections in the mirror, clouds passing in the sky, but the sky is not the clouds. Desires, memories, imagination, they all come and go. You are not your mind either, so say, ”I am not my mind.”

And thirdly, ”I am not my heart either” – the feelings. the emotions, which are the subtlest. Then who am I? When you have cut these three identities. almost nothing is left. You have cut the very root of the ego. Then you cannot even say, ”I am,” you can only say, ”There is a certain amness. but there is no I.”

”I” consists of body, mind, heart. These are the three components of the body, of the ego. Once these three are dropped, eliminated, the ego disappears. Then there is only pure awareness. The body is a form, the mind too is a form, and the heart too is a form. And the ego is the hold-all, the bundle of all the forms. When everything has been taken out, the ego becomes empty and flops.

Hence this Diamond Sutra says:

”... IF ONE SEES THAT FORMS ARE NOT FORMS...”

”The body is not my body, the mind is not my mind. I am neither in the body nor in the mind; these are only forms.” And forms are not true. Forms are only forms, waves, passing phases, like dreams. Forms are not forms. If once this is realized, then one becomes the Buddha, one sees the Buddha. Awareness is Buddha.

There is a story about Buddha; I have loved it immensely:

He is sitting underneath a tree. A great astrologer is passing by. He saw his footprints on the bank of the river in the sand. It has just rained and the sand is wet and he can see the prints of Buddha’s feet very clearly. He is puzzled, very much puzzled. His whole astrology is at risk because he has been studying his whole life that these are the symbols of a chakravartin. Chakravartin means the man who rules all over the world, the emperor of all the six continents. ”What a chakravartin is doing here in this small, poor village, by the side of this ordinary river? And walking barefooted in the sand – a chakravartin? Impossible!”

He watched very closely – must have looked through his magnifying glass. All the indications are so exactly true that either his whole astrology is wrong or a chakravartin has walked barefoot. He followed the FOOTprints where this man has gone and he finds Buddha sitting under a tree just by the side of the bank. More puzzled he became. The face of the man looks like that of a chakravartin – so graceful, so beautiful. Such splendor he has never seen in his life. But he is a beggar, his clothes are that of a beggar. And by the side of Buddha there is his begging bowl.

He went, bowed down, asked the Buddha, ”Can I ask who you are, sir? Are you a god who has descended from heaven for some special visit to the earth?”

Buddha said, ”No, I am not a god.”

”Then are you an angel?”

And Buddha said, ”No, I am not an angel.”

And this way he goes on asking and Buddha goes on saying ”No, no, no...” Annoyed, he asks, ”At least you will say yes to this question. Are you a man, or e en will you say you are not a man?”

Buddha said, ”I am not a man either.” Exasperated, the man asks, ”Then who are you?”

Buddha said, ”I am just awareness. I have dropped all forms because forms are not forms... just dreams, sky flowers.”

Sometimes you see them when you are near the ocean – you see the sky flowers. In Indian mythology they are called sky flowers. Physicists say it is condensed oxygen, because near the ocean there is too much oxygen in the air, so when you look sometimes you see forms in the sky moving.

Zen: The Special Transmission 143 Osho

CHAPTER9. THEBIRDHASFLOWN

Buddha said, ”I am only awareness, nothing else.”

This monk was reciting this sutra.

THE MASTER WAS PASSING BY AND HEARD IT.

THE MASTERS ALWAYS USE EVERY OPPORTUNITY to help people wake up; they don’t miss a single opportunity. The monk must have been his disciple.

THE MASTER WAS PASSING BY AND HEARD IT. HE THEN SAID TO THE MONK, ”YOU RECITE WRONGLY. IT GOES LIKE THIS: ’IF ONE SEES THAT FORMS ARE FORMS HE THEN SEES BUDDHA.’”

Now the Master is saying just the opposite of the sutra. The monk is reciting rightly the Master is saying it wrong. But the Master is right and the monk is wrong, because in the hands of a right person even wrong words become right and in the hands of a wrong person even right words become wrong.

It has happened many times to me. In Sarnath I was invited by the Buddhists; one Buddhist monk, Bhikshu Jagdeesh Kashyap had invited me. I was talking to the Buddhist monks. Sarnath is the place where Buddha delivered his first sermon. I told a few stories about Buddha.

After I had talked, Bhikshu Jagdeesh Kashyap, my host, stood up and said, ”We are very grateful. Nobody has talked this way to us. But the stories that you have told are not exactly as given in the scriptures; you have changed in many places.” And he was a great scholar; he knew all the scriptures.

I told him, ”You know the scriptures, I know the Buddha! So if I am saying something which is not in the scriptures, you can add it into your scriptures. If I am saying something which is different from the scriptures, then you can correct your scriptures. You know only the scriptures, I know Buddha.”

He said, ”What do you mean by knowing Buddha? He has been dead for twenty-five centuries!”

I said, ”That too is according to the scriptures; otherwise he is alive in everybody – right now! He is even alive in you. You are not aware of him, I am aware of him. I am not talking about Gautam the Buddha. I have experienced awareness, and whatsoever I am saying is according to my experience. The stories have to be this way, the way I am telling. If your scriptures say differently, then somebody must have put them wrong.”

He was my host so he could not argue that much; it would have been impolite. Later on in the night he said. But this is too much! I have been pondering over it the whole day. Do you mean to say that our scriptures which we have respected for centuries are wrong?”

I said, ”I have not said that. What I am saying is: you know only the scripture, hence your knowing is not reliable.” And I told him this story, this Zen story:

A MONK WAS RECITING THE DIAMOND SUTRA:... IF ONE SEES THAT FORMS ARE NOT FORMS HE THEN SEES BUDDHA.

The monk was reciting perfectly, exactly as it is said.

THE MASTER WAS PASSING BY AND HEARD IT. HE THEN SAID TO THE MONK, ”YOU RECITE WRONGLY. IT GOES LIKE THIS...”

He changed exactly to the opposite.

’IF ONE SEES THAT FORMS ARE FORMS...’

that the body is the body, the mind is the mind, the heart is the heart... then one sees the Buddha.

THE MONK EXCLAIMED, ”WHAT YOU HAVE SAID IS JUST THE OPPOSITE TO THE WORDS OF THE SUTRA!”

And the monk is right as far as the sutra is concerned, but still he knows only the sutra; he has no direct experience of reality.

THE MASTER THEN REPLIED, ”HOW CAN A BLIND MAN READ THE SUTRA?”

You are blind and you are talking about light! You may have read about light, but what can you say about light? Whatsoever you say is going to be wrong.

Ramakrishna used to tell again and again a story about a blind man.

A blind man was invited by a few friends; there was a feast. For the first time he tasted a new sweet made of milk. He inquired the person who was sitting by his side – and the person sitting by his side was a great pundit, a great scholar – he inquired, ”What is this?”

The pundit said, ”This is a sweet made of milk.”

The blind man asked, ”Please tell something more about milk so that I can understand more about the sweet.”

The pundit said, ”Milk? Milk is white.”

The blind man said, ”You are creating more puzzles for me. I am a blind man. Don’t create more puzzles for me, help me to understand. What is white? What do you mean by white?”

But pundits are far more blind than blind people. The pundit said, ”White? You don’t know what is white? What kind of question is this? Have you ever seen a swan? The color of the swan is white; that is what white is.”

The blind man said, ”You look annoyed, but forgive me – I am a blind man. Don’t be angry, but my curiosity has been provoked by your answers. Now I am wondering what do you mean by ’swan’? I have never heard, nobody ever told me about the swan. How a swan is? How he looks? And make it clear, knowing perfectly well that I am a blind man. First think of my blindness and then try to explain to me; according to my blindness you have to illustrate the point.”

The pundit came to his senses a little bit. He said, ”This is going ad infinitum. Whatsoever I say, this man is going to ask another question. It has to be finished!” So he took the blind man’s hand, put his on his own arm and said, ”Move your hand on my arm. Do you feel something?”

He said, ”Yes, I can feel a curved hand.”

The blind man’s answer made the pundit rejoice. He said, ”Now you will understand. This is how the neck is of the swan – curved like this hand.”

The blind man was over-rejoiced. He said, ”Thank you, many many thanks! Now I know what this sweet is made of – curved hand!”

This is a logical conclusion. A blind man cannot understand color, cannot understand whiteness. It is stupid to explain it to him. He can go on reciting sutras about whiteness for lives together; he will not know what whiteness is. What he needs is not sutras about whiteness: what he needs is a man who can wake him up, a physician who can treat his eyes, who can make him see.

THE MASTER THEN REPLIED, ”HOW CAN A BLIND MAN READ THE SUTRA?”

”You are blind. You don’t know anything. I also know,” the Master said, ”what the Sutra says.”

That is one way of approaching one’s awareness: via negativa neti-neti – neither this nor that. That is the negative path. There is another path: via affirmativa iti-iti – this too, this too. That is another way. One can reach through the negative, one can reach through the positive. And the person who has reached knows both the doors.

The first statement concerns with the negative path:

”IF ONE SEES THAT FORMS ARE NOT FORMS, HE THEN SEES BUDDHA.”

But if you have seen the Buddha within yourself, if you have come to that understanding, you will understand my statement also. Then it does not contradict it, it only compensates it; it is complementary. Then it is via positiva via affirmativa: ”IF ONE SEES THAT FORMS ARE FORMS HE THEN SEES BUDDHA.”

But both the statements will look contradictory to the blind man; to the man who has eyes there is no contradiction at all.

There are people who will find thousand and one contradictions in Buddha’s words, in Jesus’ words, for the simple reason because they have not experienced that state of consciousness where opposites meet, mingle, merge and become one, where opposites are no more opposites but become complementaries, when opposites are absolutely necessary for each other’s existence, when they are no more enemies but friends, partners in a dance. Those who have known, for them there is no contradiction at all.

It has been my experience... For all these twenty-five years I have been talking to people, again and again, scholars, professors, pundits and theologians will approach me and tell me: ”Your statements are contradictory. In one place you say one thing, in another place you say just the opposite.”

I have been telling them, ”They will appear to you contradictory only if you have not attained to awareness. to consciousness. Once that peak is attained, from that peak you can see all the paths leading towards the same peak. The path that comes from the north and the path that comes from the south are not opposites.”

But the people who are in the valley, dark valley, of course they will say that the path that goes from the north and the path that goes from the south are opposites paths: they cannot lead you to the same goal. They will quarrel, argue, fight and waste their time. And the man who sits on the top will simply laugh at the whole stupidity

All the religions have been quarreling, but there is no quarrel between Buddha and Lao Tzu, Zarathustra and Mohammed, Bahauddin and Ramakrishna, Raman and Krishnamurti; there is no quarrel. The quarrel exists only amongst philosophers. Yes, Buddha has also argued against the fools, but never against another Buddha Mahavira has also argued against the pseudo masters, but never against a true Master. Jesus has also said things against the rabbis, the priests, but never against a true prophet; that is impossible. They all have the same taste, the same experience; they have known the same truth.

It is Sunday class and the priest is praising the beauty of altruism and generosity. Pierino gets up and says, ”Yes, my father also says that in life you have to give and give and give.”

The priest is very pleased and replies, ”Your father must be a pious and God-fearing man. It would be good if there were many more like him. What does he do?”

”He is a boxer!” replies Pierino.

Manuel left Portugal and went to Brazil to start a business. When he arrived in Rio he looked up his old friend, Joaquin, who advised him to go into the motel business as it was the most profitable business in Rio.

After some months the two friends met again.
”Your suggestion is making me bankrupt!” complained Manuel.

”How can that be?” asked Joaquin. ”There are no risks in this business. Maybe you did something wrong.”

”No, no!” said Manuel. ”I did everything you suggested. I used the best architect and interior decorator. Everything has atmosphere and taste. The whole motel is designed in an Arabian style. It is very romantic – like camping in a tent in the desert. The beds are round, there are mirrors on the ceilings, exotic music is playing and there are thin veils shimmering in the soft red lamplight.”

”So what could be wrong then?” asked the friend.

”I don’t know,” answered Manuel. ”None of the couples you said would come checking in every hour have come. Only once in a while a family stops in.”

”What name have you given your motel?”

”Motel of Our Holy Mother Mary!” answers Manuel.
People function out of their own understanding; they cannot go beyond it – one cannot even expect...

Tom goes to a travel agency in New York to book his holiday in England. The girl at the counter asks him, ”Do you want to rent a car while you are in London?”

”Yes, why not?” Tom answers.

”Okay, sir, but you know in England they drive on the left hand side of the street,” the girl explains to him.

Tom is surprised. ”I did not know that, but then different countries have different customs, so why not?”

Tom happily leaves the travel agency and everything is arranged.

Two weeks later he drags himself into the office of the travel agency, arms and legs in a plaster cast. ”I want to cancel my trip to England!”

The girl at the counter wants to know what has happened to him.

Well,” he explains, ”I thought before I went to England I had better practice driving on the left hand side of the street for a while!”

A Brazilian went to a party and got very drunk – so drunk that he passed out on his way home. A little snake was passing by and somehow got into his pants and curled up comfortably in the black woods by his pelvis.

Next morning he woke, rubbed his eyes and went to pee. Putting his hand inside his fly, he pulled out the snake. Surprised, he said, ”What is that, zeezee? I knew you had this little mouth, but those two little eyes I just can’t remember!”

Two tabby cats are gossiping over the rubbish tip. One says, ”Who is the father of your last kittens?” The other replies, ”The great magnificent ginger tom from the canal bank. And you?”
”I don’t know who did it – I had my head in a sardine can at the time.”

Three women were sent to a psychiatrist for a mental health check. The psychiatrist was using word association tests. ”Blue seas, blue skies, white cliffs, glistening sands, sun shining in the sky – what do you think of?” he asked the first woman.

”Oh, a beautiful painting,” said the woman. She was a painter. ”Okay, you can go, you are sane,” said the psychiatrist.

The second woman entered the room. ”Blue seas, blue skies, white cliffs, glistening sands, sun shining in the sky – what do you think of?” asked the psychiatrist.

”Summer holidays,” said the woman. She was a teacher in a university. ”Okay, you can go, you are sane,” said the psychiatrist.

The third woman came in and the psychiatrist repeated his question: ”Blue seas, blue skies, white cliffs, glistening sands, the sun shining in the sky – what do you think of?”

”A prick,” replied the woman.

”A prick?” said the psychiatrist. ”What on earth makes you think of a prick?”

’That’s all I ever think of,” said the woman.

”Are you crazy?” asked the shrink.

”No, I am not crazy – I am just a Catholic nun,” said the woman.

But you can’t expect anything more from a Catholic nun!

People live in their own minds. Even white clouds, blue skies, sun shining in the sky, will not make much difference. They will remember only that which they can remember.

You can read the Diamond Sutra, but you will see only that which you can see, you will understand only that which you can understand. The whole point is not to know more, the whole point is to be more. The more integrated you are, the more aware you are, the more conscious you are, then there are sutras all over the place – in the grass blades, in the rocks. Yes, sermons in the rocks and scriptures in the trees. The question is of your eyes. If you are capable to see, then God is everywhere. You need not go to a church or to a temple or to a mosque. If you have clarity, transparency of vision, then you need not read the Gita, Dhammapada. the Diamond Sutra, the Koran, the Bible. Whatsoever you read will become the Diamond Sutra, will become the Bhagavad Gita, will become the Koran – all depends on you.

Hence my insistence here is to become more meditative, not more informative, to become so meditative that you are capable of seeing through and through, so that nothing hinders your vision, so that there are no more any barriers between you and reality. When reality stands naked before you and you stand naked before reality there is benediction, there is bliss.

That’s why Zen monks, Zen Masters have even said, ”Burn the scriptures.” Not that they mean literally.

One Zen Master, Ikkyu, was staying in a temple. In the night it was too cold and the temple had three wooden Buddha statues, so he took the biggest statue and made a fire inside the temple. The priest was awakened by the fire; he rushed. He was a little afraid of this man because he looked a little eccentric, but he had allowed him to stay. He looked also very nice and good. And what had he done?

The priest was mad. He said, ”What are you doing? You have burned the Buddha!”

Ikkyu took a small piece of wood and started looking, searching in the ashes. The statue was almost gone.

The priest asked, ”What are you looking for?”

He said, ”For the bones of the Buddha!”

He said, ”You must be totally mad! How a wooden statue can have bones?”

Ikkyu said, ”Then the long night is still there and it is too cold, and the Buddha within is shivering. You bring... there are two more statues – you also come and let us warm up!”

Of course the priest threw him out. This man was dangerous! He may burn all the Buddhas, he may burn even the temple. But Ikkyu was showing something to the man: that a wooden statue is a wooden statue; it is not Buddha. Buddha is within you. But if you go on worshipping a wooden statue you will remain deluded.

In the morning the priest opened the doors of the temple and he saw Ikkyu sitting outside the door with a few flowers, worshipping the milestone. He said, ”You are really mad – I feel sorry for you! Last night you burned my best statue, and now what are you doing?”

And he was saying, Buddham sharanam gachchhami Sangham sharanam gachchhami, Dhammam sharanam gachchhami... and showering flowers on the milestone. ”I go to the feet of the Buddha, I go to the feet of his commune, I go to the feet of the ultimate Tao that he has taught.” And Ikkyu said, ”When I feel like praying, I pray; then any excuse is enough. These are excuses! What is the need of having special excuses? Your statues are excuses; I invent my excuses whenever, wherever I am. I need not bother about a temple, need not bother about a statue. Wherever I am I create my Buddhas.

”Now for the moment this milestone is perfectly good. What is wrong with it? Look, how beautiful it is and with the flowers showering on it. And when I said Buddham sharanam gachchhami – I go to the feet of the Buddha, he nodded his head. It said, ’You are accepted, you are blessed!’ ”

Ikkyu was again showing the same phenomenon from a different angle. If you know, if you really know then everything is sacred; if you don’t know, then nothing is sacred, not even the sacred scriptures. If you know, then the mundane tranforms into the sacred if you don’t know, then all your sacredness is just hocus-pocus. All your temples and all your statues and all your scriptures are just inventions, imaginations, dreams.

Meditate over this story:

”HOW CAN A BLIND MAN READ THE SUTRA?”

Find out your eyes. And there is no other medicine except meditation which can help to open your eyes. The words ”medicine” and ”meditation” come from the same root; they both mean the same. Medicine cures the body, meditation cures your innermost soul. Medicine cures the outer form, meditation cures the essential being.

Scarecrow: a man who has seen everything but learned nothing b/c his body was there but he was never present. Anyone who views life thru the eyes of others believing their truth, logic/belief system

According to FUNKTIONARY:

scarecrow – a lifeless well-hung mindless man crucified in a garden who sacrifices his humanity for his manhood. 2) a man with a good looking head on his shoulders—but with no cultural consciousness. 3) a man who hangs aimlessly in the middle of a garden—guarding a coveted fertile piece of land. 4) a man hanging from a pole and a pole hanging from a man—working the fields at hand. 5) a man who has seen everything but learned nothing because his body was there but he was never present. 6) anyone who looks at life through the eyes of others believing their truth, logic or belief system. 7) a man who is hung-up on himself and thus acts as if a pole was stuck up his butt for a spine. 8) anyone who needs help to “get down” or “get off” without falling apart. 9) a threatening ruse to distract one’s enemy when there is no real or actual danger. A man whose life is spent suspended in air lives a groundless existence. Women are all-too-often stuck with a man on a pole or stuck by a man with a pole, either way, it’s still no more than being in a pole position—but who’s in the driver’s seat? Living life with a scarecrow can be scary—while he’s falling apart will you go to pieces? Should he become dis-membered will you re-member him? Garden hoe; the backbone of the scarecrow. Scarecrow—like Bob’s Big Boy—should he stay or should he go! (See: Woodman, Strawman, Osiris, Garden, Egotesticle & Straw Boss)

rebel –one who lives authentically in the present, spontaneously responding to life according to the dictates of his/her inner voice and undivided intent and unrelenting will. Rebellion is unorganized

According to FUNKTIONARY:

rebel – one who lives authentically in the present, spontaneously responding to life according to the dictates of his/her inner voice and undivided intent and unrelenting will. Rebellion is unorganized, autonomous and individualistic. Wherever there is organized rebellion, it is no longer rebellion but rather revolution planned by revolutionaries—for in the very organization, the rebellion and the rebel both die. Revolution is a social phenomenon; rebellion is meditative. Lao Tzu was a rebel; Confucius and Karl Marx were not rebels. Martin Luther was purely a cunning politician fronting as a rebel, joining vested interests after creating a rift in Christianity. He was protesting the power of the Pope, not so that power should be distributed, but that he should be given the power. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on the other hand, was a non-violent rebel. The philosophy of a rebel is always that of decentralization of power, and is the acid test of the true nature of a rebellion. A rebel is one who would rather live in hell along with those who are Alive authentically living their own reality than to be in heaven with those thinking they hold and know the truth—vicariously living. If your mama or daddy taught you well, you wouldn’t conform, assimilate, or shirk, you’d raise your frequency, change the channel and rebel. For a rebel, its space is always here, and its time is always now. To a rebel, the past is an unnecessary burden—one need not carry it. (See: Authenticity, Presence, Selt-Realization, Protestant, Pope, The Reformation, Revolution, Religion, Ideology, Ego, Mass, Class, Collective, Assimilation, Conformity & Rebellion)

A Meditator Needs No Personal Guidance - OSHO Rajineesh

A Meditator Needs No Personal Guidance

OSHO Rajineesh

Meditation gave my life direction and joy and grace and more. Now, I realize that I have always had a need for personal guidance from somebody tuning into me and my questions. Would you please comment?

The way you are growing in silence, in your meditations, in your grace, and the way the gratitude is coming to you, you don't need any personal guidance. You need to be more and more open to the impersonal existence. The idea of personal guidance is mind's old habit to become dependent on someone; and I am struggling hard against your habits.

The whole existence is available to guide you ― and you are now in a position to be in direct contact with the universe. As your gratitude deepens, as your grace becomes more and more clear, as your silence becomes more and more rooted in you ― it is the universe itself which takes you into its own hands. Those hands are invisible, but they are there; you are not orphans in the universe. You are immensely needed and loved, you are just not aware of it.

My own suggestion is to drop the idea of personal guidance, because anybody will try to guide you according to his mind, according to his ideas of how you should be. That's what all the teachers of the world have been doing: imposing their idea, their image on people who are searching and seeking guidance. It is one of the most dangerous games to play, because in it you are always the loser. If the teacher succeeds in imposing certain directions, certain patterns, disciplines, according to me it is not guidance; it is misguidance. Because nobody knows your unique self ― only you can know it. And you have to grow according to your nature, not according to anybody's guidance.

To me, to be natural, to be spontaneous is enough. All guides have been misguides. And you can see it: the whole universe of humanity is living in tremendous misguidance. Otherwise why should there be so much insanity? Why should there be so much misery, so much agony and spiritual suffering? The reason is that nobody has been allowed to be just himself, his natural being.

Your so-called religions don't trust nature.

They trust in holy scriptures; they trust in dead words spoken thousands of years before by people we do not know. Whether they knew anything, or they were just creating fictions...unless you know, you can never be certain. But they are molding you according to patterns created in the past. This process of molding people into Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, Buddhists, goes against the very basic human right; it does not allow you to be your natural self. And unless you are yourself, you cannot be happy.

Just think, if there were teachers teaching roses that they have to become lotuses.... Fortunately, roses don't care about teachers and religions and churches. But just think for a moment: if people were there who were telling the roses to be lotuses, the marigolds to be roses, what would be the ultimate outcome of it?

Roses would try to become lotuses, which they can never become; it is not their self-nature. They can only be roses, beautiful, immensely graceful, fragrant. But if this idea of being somebody other than what their nature is, is imposed on them, two things will happen: they will never become lotuses, but their whole energy will be wasted in trying to become lotuses. And the second thing is they will not be roses either, because from where will they find the energy to be roses? That whole energy is making an effort for the impossible.

Actually the same has happened with humanity. Everybody is giving you an idea; everybody is ready to tell you how you should be.

All "shoulds" and all "should nots" have to be abandoned.

You simply have to listen to your own inner voice. And wherever it leads, just go without bothering whether people think it is right or wrong.

If you can become just your own self, if you can blossom into your intrinsic nature, only then will you have blissfulness ― a peace which cannot be expressed in words, and a certain poetry to your being; a certain dance to your being, because you will be in tune with existence. To be in tune with yourself is the only way to be in tune with existence. Nobody needs personal guidance, because all personal guidance is a beautiful name for dependence on somebody and he is going to distort you.

I don't give you any discipline ― I don't tell you, you should be this or that. I simply say you should become silent, so that you can listen to your still, small voice. That is your real guide; the guide is within you. I know hundreds of psychoanalysts, psychologists, so-called counselors. They are burdened with all kinds of problems, but they have just learned the technique, either from education or from the libraries. And they go on advising ― to advise is so simple. In their own lives they are not what they are advising. If you watch the life...as I have watched very closely the life of people like Sigmund Freud ― the topmost counselors in the world: Karl Gustav Jung, Alfred Adler, Assagioli ― I have been simply shocked to see that these people have become the guides to millions of people.

I remember one small incident...

Wilhelm Reich, as a young psychoanalyst, was deeply interested to meet Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. He had read in the universities and he was a genius, perhaps of a far greater quality than Sigmund Freud himself. Sigmund Freud was in his old age, just in his last years, and this Wilhelm Reich was asking again and again for an appointment. Finally he got the appointment. And the way Sigmund Freud treated him is so inhuman, just because he was a young man, fresh from the university.

He had come with some significant questions, and he had created in his own mind a great image of Sigmund Freud, naturally. He asked, "I have come from far away to inquire a few things: One, you insist that unless a man is psychoanalyzed, completely psychoanalyzed, he will never be out of confusion and misery. Can you show me a man who has been completely analyzed, so I can just meet him and see what a completely clear man would be like? I have read about it, but I don't have any personal experience of meeting somebody who is beyond confusion and is pure clarity."

Sigmund Freud became angry, and he said, "What kind of nonsense... psychoanalysis is not a simple thing. It takes decades for anybody to become completely psychoanalyzed."

Reich was shocked, but he said, "You have been working your whole life. Have you psychoanalyzed any person completely, so that I can go and see the person? Because other than that there is no proof that what you are saying has any significance as far as science is concerned." And seeing Sigmund Freud getting angry...because Sigmund Freud was not accustomed to such questions, he was surrounded with cronies, yea-sayers. Whatever nonsense he would say, they would say that it was a great truth. Seeing Sigmund Freud getting so angry, Reich said, "Drop that subject. I want to know whether you have been psychoanalyzed totally or not." And Sigmund Freud had to tell him, "Get out! And never again try to come to me; you don't know how to behave."

The reality is that all his life Sigmund Freud was being asked by his colleagues again and again, "Just as you psychoanalyze us, now we know the technique, why don't you get psychoanalyzed, by any of us you choose? We would like to have a look into your inner world of dreams, imaginations, desires, to see whether what you claim to be absolute clarity, peace, integrity is there inside you or not?"

He refused continuously; he never allowed himself to be psychoanalyzed, and he is the founder of psychoanalysis. Why was he so afraid to be psychoanalyzed? He knew perfectly well that it is easy to advise others, but it is difficult to transform yourself. He was suffering from ordinary human problems, the same tensions, the same misery, the same repressions, the same inhibitions, the same taboos. And he was afraid to open up his dream world because that would show things which would be a proof that although he was the founder, he himself was not what he was trying for the whole of humanity to be. The same is the situation today. Psychoanalysts themselves once in a while go to another psychoanalyst to be psychoanalyzed, because they have become too burdened with problems. It is such a stupid game.

If Gautam Buddha says anything about meditation it is his own experience, not just a theoretical, intellectual formulation. If he says something about the inner light, he has seen it. If he says it is possible to go beyond mind, he has gone beyond mind, only then he says it. And the people who watched him for forty-two years continuously never found any flaw, never found him at any time angry, at any time miserable, at any time sad. One cannot pretend for forty-two years continuously; one needs holidays! Even to pretend for a few hours to be what you are not is such a tension and such a burden that you are going to drop it and expose yourself at the slightest excuse.

This is the difference between the Western psychoanalytic movement and the Eastern movement for meditation.

I have told you a Sufi story...

A woman was very much impressed by a Sufi mystic, and she was very worried about her only son. She was living for him; the father was dead. That boy was her life, and she wanted him to become something.

The boy was too attached to eating sweets and all kinds of junk. She tried hard; everybody, the teachers, the priests all tried, but the boy was absolutely indifferent to their advice; he continued to eat sweets.

He was the only son, so finally the mother would relax and would give him what he wanted; otherwise, he would remain hungry. But he would not eat anything that he did not want to eat; he would eat only things that he wanted to eat. And those were things which were not healthy, which were not nourishing, which could create problems later in his life.

The Sufi mystic had come wandering into the village, and the woman thought it was a good chance. That man has such a tremendous and powerful aura around him, perhaps he may be able to change this stupid boy's mind. She took the boy...she had been taking him to anybody who could help; it had become almost a routine thing. The boy went there very reluctantly, very resistant; it had become almost a question of his own self-respect.

When the woman told the Sufi master about the situation, he said, "You will have to forgive me. Right now I cannot say a single word to this beautiful boy. I am old, I am seventy years, but it will take at least two weeks for me to be able to say something to him."

The woman could not believe him. Anybody, any idiot was ready to advise. And a great mystic followed by many many people, says to the boy, "You will have to forgive me; you came and I cannot advise you right now. You will have to give me two weeks at least."

The boy for the first time dropped his reluctance, his resistance. For the first time he was respected, he was accepted as a dignified human being; he was not condemned out of hand. And the old man was really concerned, he wanted to give him some advice which would be of importance; he needed at least two weeks' time. The mother was absolutely shocked, could not believe that this great mystic cannot advise a small boy right now on such a trivial matter. But what to do? They had to wait two weeks.

After two weeks she came again. This time the boy came very joyously. In fact, he was very eager about how fast the days were moving, and he was counting because he wanted to see the mystic again. "He is a totally different man from all other men you have taken me to." The woman was surprised because the boy was always resistant, reluctant. He went against his will, was forced to go ― and this time he is so eager! He cannot wait for two weeks; those two weeks look like two years.

Finally the day came, and in the early morning the boy took a shower, changed his clothes, got ready. The mother said, "What is the hurry?"

He said, "I want to see the man. He is the only man that I have felt respects others."

Otherwise, advising others is a kind of humiliation; it is saying: I know and you do not know. I am the guide and you are the guided. I am the teacher and you are the taught. It is enjoying a certain egotism at the cost of humiliating the other person.

They went, and the woman first asked, "Before I ask about the boy, I want to know why it took two weeks for you ― is it such a great philosophical problem?"

The mystic said, "If it were a philosophical problem I would have answered immediately; it is an existential problem. I am seventy years old; he is just seven years old. I have lived ten times more than the boy, still I love to eat sweets. And as long as I myself eat sweets I cannot say anything. These two weeks I tried not to eat sweets and to see what happens. My advice will depend on my own experience, not just on the common opinion that sweets are bad. They may be bad, but if I cannot drop them at seventy years of age, to expect a small boy to drop them.... I cannot advise that."

The boy was immensely impressed. A man at this age tortured himself for two weeks? And he said to the boy, "My son, it is very difficult. I managed to drop sweets, and I have managed now for the rest of my life ― but to advise you I feel a little shaky. You are so young. To drop sweets if you love them will be arduous, and to impose this idea on you I will be almost being violent and violating your individual right. So all that I can say is, it is good and it is healthy, but it is very difficult. It is a challenge. You can choose whether you are ready to take the challenge. I have dropped them for the rest of my life; only now have I the authority to say to you that you can also drop. But it is certainly a difficult thing. Are you ready for a challenge, an adventure?"

The boy said, "I drop them right now, and for my whole life. If you can drop them, why can't I drop them? And you are so old; I am so young. You are getting weaker; I am getting stronger. I can take the challenge; you don't feel worried about it."

The mother could not believe what is happening: it is a miracle. The boy is persuading the old man, "I will be able."

The old man said, "My feeling is, you should also think about it for two weeks, try...."

The boy said, "No. I am dropping them right now in your presence, with your blessings."

The people you go to for personal counseling are in the same boat in which you are; they have the same problems. Here, I have all kinds of psychotherapists, and they are good at their work technically. They know how to help people, but they don't know how to help themselves. They write their problems to me, and they are the same problems for which they are known to be good counselors, good therapists. To know something technically is one thing, and to know something existentially, experientially, is another thing.

As far as you are concerned, you are already moving on the right path. These are good symptoms that you are feeling a sense of direction, joy, grace, and more; these are indications that you are on the right path ― you don't need any personal counseling. You need to be yourself more and more, more integrated, more natural, more spontaneous. You have found the path, now anybody else can disturb it. It is possible that you may go to a counselor who has not even grown as much as you, but he is very knowledgeable. His expertise is great; he can talk about things and distract you from the path.

A meditator needs no personal guidance. A meditator, on the contrary, needs only one thing: the atmosphere of meditation.

He needs other meditators; he needs to be surrounded by other meditators. Because whatever goes on happening within us is not only within us, it affects people who are close by. In this communion people are at different stages of meditation. To meditate with these people, just to sit silently with these people, and you will be pulled more and more towards your own intrinsic potentiality.

I don't want you to become somebody else, a Gautam Buddha or a Jesus Christ. I want you to become just yourself, anonymous, nobody special, but blissful. And you are already on the right path. You have taken a few steps; now just go on moving, trusting yourself, and on each step your confidence will become deeper.

Never ask for advice, because everybody is so unique and so different that there has never been any person like you before, nor is there going to be another person like you again. So really, no guidelines for you exist. But existence is greatly compassionate. It has given you the whole program of your life in a seed form. If you don't ask anybody, and just silently listen to your own heart and go on following it, you will reach the space where you can feel at home; where suddenly you realize who you are, where suddenly you feel a synchronicity with the whole existence.

All that is natural, the trees, the clouds, the mountains, the oceans, with all of them you will find a certain harmony. You will not find harmony with machines, big and great computers, factories, automobiles, railway trains. You may not find any harmony... there is no question, because these are heartless, lifeless things. They don't know how to sing; they don't know how to dance. Have you seen any computer dancing? Have you heard of any computer falling in love with a woman computer? Only machines will be left out.

With all that is natural and all that grows, all that blossoms, all that moves and breathes, all that has a heartbeat, you will find a tremendous harmony. Your heartbeat will be merging and melting into the universal heartbeat ― no personal counseling.

I am not a counselor. Never even for a single moment in my life have I thought that somebody should be according to my ideas. I share my ideas, I share my experiences ― not so that you should become a certain ideal; I share with you as fellow travelers. It may harmonize with you. You may find that it comes suddenly to your awareness that this is very natural for you; that you were not aware of it, you have become aware. But it is not my idea then. It is your own idea of which you have not been aware. I share my ideas with you, not to make you into certain prototypes, but to give you an insight into your own nature.

I know myself, I know my nature; I know that all my well-wishers, my parents, my teachers, my professors, my friends, have tried their hardest to make me something else. And I am immensely grateful to existence that I never listened to anybody; I simply went on following my own inner voice. Whether it leads me into hell or into heaven I have not cared, because my feeling is that if my nature leads me into hell then perhaps that is the place where I belong. In heaven I will be an outsider, I will feel unfit.

Wherever my nature leads is the place that can give me the feeling of joy and the feeling that life has tremendous meaning, that it has great splendor; that it is a miracle just to breathe in and breathe out; that nothing can be more perfect if you reach to the climax of your own nature.

Avoid advisers ― because they are so available all around that whether you ask their advice or not they will give it. People love to give advice; it has a certain joy. People would love to create their own carbon copies, and they will feel very happy that they are the original and everybody is just at the most a true copy.

You have your own originality.

It is better to remember it always.

Never go against your inner feelings.

Very few people in the world have come to the flowering, and the reason is that very few people have been rebellious enough against the so-called advisers. Very few people have dared to find their path and have not followed the superhighway where everybody is going. But those are the few people who have helped humanity, its whole evolution, its whole intelligence. Just take away those few people and man will be back to where Darwin thinks he started growing to be a human being.

The crowd must have laughed at that time also. When a monkey came down from the trees and stood on the ground on his two feet, the whole crowd of monkeys must have laughed, giggled: "Look at that character! Look at that fool who is going against tradition, against our forefathers, against our religion, against our race." But they must have condemned that monkey who rebelled against the whole culture of the monkeys, their civilization; they must have said, "You have fallen down." Naturally, he has fallen down from the trees. And as time passed, he must have become weaker. Monkeys are far stronger than you are; they have to be, they are doing continuous exercise jumping from one tree to another. You have to do something else; you cannot do that kind of jumping now. You are not capable; your body has changed completely.

But the first monkey who came down must have been a genius, must have wanted to explore life on his own rather than with the crowd and the mob. Other monkeys are still hanging on the trees ― they are traditional people! They believe in their ancestors, they believe in their golden past and they don't want to change. To change, one needs courage ― and to be alone, and to make your path. And make your path by walking it; don't look for a ready-made path. It may have served somebody else but it was not made for you.

If one remembers some self-respect and dignity of his own being, then there is no need of anybody to teach you, to help you. You are born as a complete being, with all the potential. You just have to work on your potential and you will find the goal.

Leo Tolstoy is reported to have said ― and before I quote him, I have to give you the background....

He had the most miserable life possible. He was born in a super-rich family, a distant cousin to the royalty. He himself was a count; his wife was a countess. Both families were within the ten topmost families of Russia, but he was utterly miserable. He could not manage to live his life with his family, with his wife, and the reason was simply that both were of totally different natures. The wife could not even look at him. To him the way he was behaving was saintly. He used rotten clothes the way beggars do, old secondhand shoes, and lived in a way only a beggar is supposed to live. Naturally, the wife could not tolerate him. She has lived like a queen, and she was one of the richest women in Russia.

But Leo Tolstoy was a Gandhian, you will be surprised to know. Although Gandhi came later, in the last days of Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi and he had written a few letters to each other. And Mahatma Gandhi declared that he has been under three masters; one is Leo Tolstoy, another is Henry Thoreau, and the third is a Jaina monk, Shrimad Rajchandra. These three people impressed Mahatma Gandhi.

Mahatma Gandhi was working in South Africa but he was very much impressed by the lifestyle of Leo Tolstoy. His wife was so angry that they were not even talking to each other. Talking meant always a fight. They had different natures. Tolstoy was trying hard to make his wife live a simple life, the life of poverty because, "blessed are the poor." He was a fanatical follower of Jesus Christ. Literally, he was living a poor life ― and the wife was feeling absolute repugnance. She wanted him to live like a prince, as he really was. They quarreled their whole lives, both trying to make the other be according to his ideas, or her ideas. This is an extreme case, but this is the story of all families: nobody is allowed to be himself ― people go on manipulating.

Maneesha is writing a book about her experiences with me. Just the other day I heard that her mother from Melbourne, Australia, has written a very angry letter, "First you made me condemned by the Christian society here in Melbourne, and now you are trying to write a book, I hear. That means you would expose it to the whole world, and particularly in Melbourne where I will have to suffer."

And it is not any exception. Devageet has received a letter from his mother saying, "Stop writing the book," because he is also writing a book. Now these poor mothers are in great anxiety. What are these people going to write about them? ― that must be a deep fear. Secondly, they will expose that Christianity is no longer relevant, that something new, something basically discontinuous with the past is needed. And that's what sannyas is. So they must be afraid of the crowd, of the church, of the congregation, of the priest; what they will say: "Look what your son has done," or "Look what your daughter has done. You did not bring them up rightly; they have gone astray."

Everybody is concerned that everybody else should not go astray.

And what do they mean by astray? You should not go in a different direction than they are going. And you know their whole life is misery, you know their whole mind is full of anxiety and agony; you have never seen them joyous. You have never felt a deep harmoniousness with your own parents. And they have tried in every way ― in your helplessness, because every child is helpless ― to force you onto the way that they think is right.

But their whole life proves that they are not right. If their life was a life of joy and songs and celebrations, the children would have followed without any punishment, without any harassment, without any torture. And now Maneesha and Devageet are not small children; they have their lives, they have their lifestyle and they want to share it with the whole world. Why should their mothers be so concerned? What is the fear?

Leo Tolstoy says, "All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." I cannot agree with him; I would rather change the whole statement to the contrary: All unhappy families resemble one another, but each happy family is happy in its own way.

And the same is true about individuals: All unhappy individuals resemble each other; only happy individuals have a uniqueness. Happiness, growing towards blissfulness, makes you unique in a world which is full of misery.

Always remember, the whole effort of psychoanalysis and other therapies, and other so-called wise men is nothing but to help you remain normal, to help you remain part of the crowd. The moment you try to become an individual you will be condemned, because five billion people cannot be wrong ― although they are suffering in hell. But the number is never decisive about truth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson has made a statement: "To be great is to be misunderstood."

I knew one very beautiful man...

There were only two men in India who were respected so highly as to be called Mahatma; Mahatma means the great soul. One was Mahatma Gandhi and another was Mahatma Bhagwandin. I was very much interested in Mahatma Bhagwandin, just as he was very loving towards me. I was a small child when we became friends, because he had stayed with my family. He had come to deliver some lectures in the town, and we used to go for morning walks together. By and by, we forgot completely that he is very ancient, old. We started arguing and discussing.

It was just by coincidence that he was on his deathbed in Nagpur and I was coming from Wardha, from a lecture tour. Somebody in the train told me, "Mahatma Bhagwandin is very very sick, and there seems to be no possibility that he will survive more than a week." So I stopped at Nagpur and went to see him.

He was almost dead; he had become absolutely like a skeleton. He opened his eyes and he took my hand in his hand, and he said, "I am worried about you, that you will be misunderstood your whole life. There is still time for you to agree with the masses, whether they are right or wrong." And he was saying it out of compassion. He said, "Because I have suffered my whole life, and I have been condemned, I don't want you to be condemned."

I said, "Do you want me to be a hypocrite and respectable? Do you want me to be something other than my nature allows me?"

He said, "I knew you would argue, and I know that you are right. It is just a fatherly feeling; I have suffered my whole life because I always was in favor of unpopular movements, unpopular ideologies... and you are far more dangerous, you are against everybody."

I said, "I have to be against everybody. I have to be just myself. And anybody who wants to pull me in some other direction is not my friend." I said, "I understand your love, but you should also understand my situation. I would rather be condemned by the whole world than go against my nature. Because who cares about the world? They cannot bring me the truth; they cannot bring me the meaning; they cannot bring me the significance. What can they give to me? ― respectability, honor? And what am I going to do with respectability and honor? Those are all bogus words used to cheat people. I simply want to be nobody; I am going to stick to myself. And this is my promise to you as you are dying. Remember my words even when you are dead, that I will..."

He said, "I knew you wouldn't listen. And I am happy that you are absolutely determined." He had tears of joy in his eyes ― not of sadness, joy. He said, "If you had agreed with me, I would have felt very sad that the world has lost another individual. But you don't agree with me, even when you see I am dying. In such a situation anybody will say, just to be polite, 'Yes, whatever you say I will do.' Even in such a situation you are not ready to accept. I can die joyfully because I have loved you and I have watched how you are growing ― of course with a concern that you will be condemned by religions, by governments, by masses."

But what about all your psychotherapists, your leaders, your teachers, your universities ― what is their function? Their function is to keep you within the fold; to keep you just a sheep amongst the crowd of sheep and never allow you to be yourself. They are all angry with me for telling this to young people who have not yet died ― because people mostly die nearabout thirty years of age, that is average. And then they are buried when they are seventy. That is almost forty years that people live a posthumous life; they have died long before.

The day you decide that it is better to be a hypocrite and just do whatever everybody else is doing and not be different, you have died ― you have committed suicide.

My whole teaching is:

Don't commit spiritual suicide.

You don't need anybody else to guide you, because whoever guides you will guide you wrongly. He cannot know your nature and he cannot look into your future. He has no eyes, and there is no possibility. How can you see in a seed the flowers that will come one day years after? All that can be done is that the seed should be given a right soil ― not right advice. Not that you have to be a lotus, or you have to be a rose.

Care should be taken that the seed is not destroyed, that when small leaves start growing out of it, they are not destroyed. That's the function of the master: not to guide you but just to protect you when you need protection, when you are so fragile, so new. Just growing, the new leaves coming out of the earth, entering into an unknown world where strong winds blow, heavy rain falls, there is every possibility that you may be destroyed. The function of the master is not to lead you. The function of the master is to help you, to protect you, but only to the moment when you can stand on your own. Then slowly, slowly detach himself from you so that you can dance alone in the sky under the stars in your full glory.

Johannes Wolfgang von Goethe has made a beautiful statement: "All theory, dear friend is grey. But the golden tree of actual life springs ever green."

Avoid theories; they are all grey.

Let the dead people discuss theories.

The living have something more golden, something more alive. They have to love; they have to meditate. They have to become enlightened before death knocks on their doors.

Also remember that life is not the way it is lived in California! California is almost a vast crazy place where people are going from one master to another master, just like any fashion. Just as they change their toothpaste, they change their masters. Just as they change their soaps, they change their teachers, their counselors, their psychoanalysts. Oscar Wilde used to say, "Fashion is a form of ugliness, so intolerable that we have to change it every six months." There is no need.

Just the other day, I received a letter from a sannyasin saying that he is going to a teacher; has he my blessings?...can he go? People are in a strange situation; they want to ride on many boats. They are creating their life in such a way that it will be a disaster. If you are growing well...and he writes that his meditation is going well, he is starting to see things that have so far been only words. Now at this fragile moment, going to somebody is dangerous. But if I say, "Don't go," I interfere. And I would not like to interfere, even if you are going wrong.

So I have informed him: I cannot bless because I don't know to whom you are going, but you are intelligent enough. If you feel that the person is going in some way to nourish your growth, which is going perfectly right even according to you ― you are feeling that you are absolutely on the right path, that misery is disappearing, that suffering is disappearing, that you are no more worried; that a kind of playfulness, weightlessness is arising ― if you are aware of all this... Remember, that if anybody can be of nourishment, it is perfectly good to go.

But in fact, there is no need to go anywhere, you are going so right. Go more deeply into it, rather than going sideways.

Go straight like an arrow.

"Mind is misunderstanding. Mind means you have a priori conclusions, you're not seeing that which is. You're projecting.Your mind uses everything as a kind of screen, it projects itself on the screen"

Osho Rajineesh from Zen, The Special Transmission

The first question
Bhagwan, WHAT IS UNDERSTANDING AND WHAT IS MISUNDERSTANDING?

Mind is misunderstanding – any kind of mind, good or bad, educated or uneducated, cultured or uncultured, Christian or Hindu; it does not matter what kind of mind it is. Mind as such is misunderstanding. Mind means you are carrying a priori conclusions; you are not seeing that which is, you are seeing that which you want to see. You are not seeing but projecting. Your mind is a projector; it uses everything as a kind of screen, it projects itself on the screen.

In the dim light you can see a rope as a snake. the snake does not exist; it is your fear projected, the rope becomes a screen. But for you the snake becomes as real as if it was really there. It can affect you – it will affect you. You may start trembling, you may start running, you may slip on a banana peel, you may fall down, you may have a heart attack – and all these things will be real. One can even be killed! And there was no snake at all. You created the whole thing, you invented it, you projected it.

The world that we know is not actually the world that is; it is the world that we are projecting. This is a misunderstanding. That’s why the eastern mystics have called our world nothing but a maya, an illusion. It does not mean that the rocks are not there, that the walls are not there and you can pass through them. It does not mean that the matter does not exist. It simply means that what exists is not known by you, and what is known by you is something else. Something certainly exists, but it remains unknown to the mind.

The mind is a barrier. It does not allow you to see, to feel, to know, to understand. It goes on creating misunderstanding, it is the source of all distortions. Hence, unless mind is put aside, understanding does not arise.

Understanding means a state of no-mind. That’s what meditation is all about. Meditation is the art of putting the mind aside, not allowing it to interfere, not allowing it to stand between you and the real. When you face the real without any interference of any kind – philosophical, political, religious – when there is no idea between you and the real, when the real is simply reflected in you like a tree is reflected in the lake or the fac@ is reflected in a mirror, then there is understanding.

Understanding is a byproduct of meditation; misunderstanding is a shadow of the mind. And these are the only two ways a man can live: either one can live as a mind or one can live as meditation. If you live as a mind you will be living in misunderstanding. But because millions of people around you are living also in the mind you never become aware that what you are doing to reality, how you are distorting it, how you are continuously avoiding it.

Rather than getting acquainted with it, how your mind is functioning as a barrier... it is not a bridge. But if you live with people who have the similar minds like you... A Christian living among Christians will never feel that there is anything wrong in Christianity. The Hindu can see it very easily because he does not have the same projection. The Jew can see very easily; there is no problem in it. In fact, the Jew cannot understand how so many people are befooled by stupid doctrine. The Christian can see the foolishness of the Hindu – it is so obvious. The Hindu can see the mediocre ideology of the Mohammedans; not much intelligence is needed to see it. The Mohammedan can see the same in Hindus, Christians, Jews. They all go on quarreling with each other trying to prove that the other is wrong, but the reality is that mind is wrong.

That’s the difference here. I am not telling you Hinduism is right or Christianity is right or Judaism is right. I am simply telling you mind is wrong and no-mind is right. Now, no-mind cannot have any adjective: it cannot be Hindu, cannot be Mohammedan, cannot be Christian. Mind can have an adjective. Mind will have an adjective, is bound to have an adjective. It will have a certain definition, a certain limitation. No-mind is vast like the great space; it is void, it is clear. It is clarity, it is transparency.

But we all live in our prejudices because we are all past-oriented. Whatsoever had been taught to us we go on repeating, whatsoever has been told to us we will go on telling to our children. That’s how diseases are transferred from one generation to another generation. We call it heritage, we call it culture, religion, we call it our great past. Past is dead and to carry the dead is to become dead yourself.

To live in the present is the only way to be really alive and to be in tune with reality. God is always present, never past, never future. You cannot say ”God was,” you cannot say ”God will be” – you can only say ’God is.”

No-mind is: mind never is. Either it belongs to the past... You can look in, you can just try to find out. I am not talking about any abstract theory, I am simply stating a fact. You can experiment with it. You can look into each of your thoughts and you will see from where it comes; it belongs to the past. Or maybe you have some desire for the future; that too is nothing but a modified past, a refined past. But mind is never present.

And understanding means to be in tune with that which is, to be totally in tune, in accord with Tao, with God, with dhamma, with truth.

My sannyasins don’t belong to any religion; they cannot belong. They belong to reality. They belong to the reality that is without and the reality that is within, and they live in a harmony between the without and the within. That harmony is the ultimate in understanding.

Buddha has called it wisdom, prajna. Buddha has said meditation is the means and wisdom is the end. Meditation is the tree and wisdom is its flowering. But people who go on carrying their prejudices, their ideologies, their political doctrines, their theologies, their nationalities, their pasts, remain stupid.

If you want to remain stupid, cling to the mind. The mind can become very sophisticated, but it is nothing but stupidity sophisticated. It is stupidity pretending to be intelligent; that’s what we call intelligentsia, the so-called intellectuals. They are not really intelligent people, they are only pretenders. Professors, authors, philosophers, scholars, these are not intelligent people, otherwise they would have been Buddhas; they are only intellectuals. Their mind is stuffed with great information – and mind is capable of collecting great information.

The psychologists have found that a single mind-system has such potential, almost unimaginable potential of collecting information, that it looks that it cannot happen. How it can happen? The psychologists say that each single mind can contain all the information contained in all the books of the world. Of course then the person will look as a great intellect. Yes, he has a great deal of information – he has become a computer – but if you look into his life, if you look into his ordinary life or in moments when his information is of no use, where he has to face life and respond spontaneously, you will immediately see his mediocrity, his stupidity.

And it is a well-known fact that scholars, professors, philosophers, behave very stupidly in situations where spontaneity is needed. If you ask something that they know already, about which they have enough information, then they will look very great, intelligent persons. But just a small situation will be able to expose them.

A great scholar is staying in a hotel. He is very upset and complains to the clerk at the reception of the hotel. ”What kind of hotel is this?” he cries. ”There is no toilet paper in the bathroom.”

”We are very sorry, sir. It must have been a mistake.”

”This is too much! Last night I could not clean myself because there was no paper. You are a bunch of incompetents!”

The manager came to the rescue of the clerk. ”Sir, you should have called room service. Don’t you have a tongue?”

”Sure I have, but I am not a contortionist!”

A professor with a wooden eye stood alone in a corner at the dance. He was so self-conscious about his wooden eye that he hardly ever mixed with people. He was very sad and lonely. Then he spotted a girl across the room who was also alone. She had a huge wart on her nose.

”Well,” he thought to himself, ”she is no beauty with that wart and all, but never mind – maybe she would dance with me.”

So he gathered up all his courage and walked over to her. ”Would you... would you like to dance with me?” he stammered.

Her face brightened. ”Would I! Would I!” she cried.
Offended, the professor yelled back, ”Wart nose! Wart nose!”

Any small situation in which his information is not applicable, in which his scholarship has nothing to say, will be enough to expose his stupidity.

Dharmaraj, as far as Zen is concerned, mind is misunderstanding and no-mind is understanding. If you want to have understanding, move from mind to no-mind. Don’t go on polishing the mind. That’s what people are doing. You can go on polishing it your whole life; you will have a very polished mind in the end, but that will simply mean a very polished misunderstanding. It will be difficult for people to see – your stupidity will be very much hidden – but if you come across a Buddha then you will be exposed. Then his X-ray eyes will immediately see that you are just stupid and nothing else.

When Maulingaputta, a very great and famous scholar of Buddha’s days, came to see him, he had come really to argue with him. He had come with his five hundred followers. These kind of people can always gather other stupid people who are impressed by their information. There are always enough fools in the world. If you are a fool don’t lose heart – you can still become a guru because there are greater fools than you! And there is no end to it. You have just to gather courage and start bragging about your knowledge of the Vedas and the Bible and the Koran, and you will find many fools coming around you. They may not understand a Buddha – in fact they will not understand a Buddha – but they will understand you. Buddha will seem to be too far away, too far removed, almost as if living on some other planet. But you are very close to them; deep down you are the same person, of the same quality, only you have a greater quantity of information than they have. And people become very much impressed by quantity. To see quality one needs understanding; to see quantity no understanding is needed. Any fool can see quantity.

Five hundred fools were following Maulingaputta and he was traveling all over the country defeating other scholars. Now only Buddha was left; he thought he had conquered everybody. That was a routine phenomenon in India, that scholars used to roam about in the country, discussing, arguing, debating, defeating, conquering. It is the same as others do with swords – they were doing with their sharpened minds. They were using their minds like swords, cutting each other’s throats.

He came to Buddha, very arrogant, obviously, because he knew all the Vedas and all the Upanishads and he knew all the ancient lore. He was well-educated, well-cultured. He belonged to a very famous family of scholars; for generations they had been famous. And his name was spreading like wildfire – and, of course, five hundred disciples coming with him.

Buddha looked at him, and the first thing he did – he laughed.
Maulingaputta was offended. He said, ”Why are you laughing?”
Buddha said, ”I am laughing because once I had stayed in a village for the rainy season...”

In the rainy season Buddha used to stay for four months because traveling was impossible. You can think of the roads twenty-five centuries before – Indian roads! Even now in the rainy season they are not worth traveling, and Buddha was traveling on foot and it was difficult, almost impossible. So he used to stay for four months in one place; eight months he will travel to spread his word.

Buddha said, ”Once I was staying in a village for four months. Every day I used to see a man sitting in front of his house counting all the cows and the buffaloes and the bulls going to the river to drink water and coming back from the river. I became interested that why he goes counting every day how many cows, how many bulls, how many buffaloes, have gone to the river. So I asked him, ’What is the matter? Do these cows and the bulls and the buffaloes belong to you? Why you go on counting?’

”He said, ’No, they don’t belong to me – they belong to the people of the village.’
” ’How many cows belong to you?’ I asked him.
”He said, ’Nobody had ever asked me this. I am a poor man. I don’t have even a single cow.’”

Buddha said, ”Then why you go on counting? And you look so happy counting others’ cows and bulls and buffaloes. Are you a fool? Why are you wasting your time? And every day! It is better to have one’s own cow, even if one has only one cow, because that will give you milk and nourishment.

”Seeing you I remembered that man, Maulingaputta.”

Maulingaputta said, ”How am I related to that man? Are you mad or something? Why should you remember that man?”

And Buddha said, ”I am remembering that man because whatsoever you know does not belong to you. These are other people’s cows – the Vedas, the Upanishads. I can see your head is full of all kinds of things, beautiful sayings, wise sayings. They have made you look wise, but you are not a wise man. You tell me one thing: do you know or you are simply repeating the scriptures?”

The question had come in such a sudden way. Nobody had asked it before because Maulingaputta had never come across a Buddha. He was meeting other scholars who were counting also the same – others’ cows and bulls and buffaloes – and of course he had counted more than they had counted.

And Buddha looked deep into him and he said, ”Come close to me, let me look into your eyes and answer me honestly – is this your experience? Have you experienced God? Have you experienced samadhi? Have you experienced the truth?”

Maulingaputta felt ashamed, started looking down, could not raise his head in front of Buddha.

And Buddha said, ”At least you are a sincere person, an honest person. I respect your sincerity – you cannot lie. Do you want to experience truth, or do you think it is enough that others have known and you can go on just repeating their words like a parrot?”

Maulingaputta said, ”Yes, sir, I would like to know.”

Then Buddha said, ”Sit by my side and for two years remain absolutely silent – no talking, no questioning, no argumentation, no studying. Throw all your scriptures and for two years sit in silence by my side. After two years you can ask whatsoever you want to ask.”

After those two years Buddha asked Maulingaputta, ”Now do you want to ask anything?”

Maulingaputta bowed down, touched his feet and said, ”I am grateful. The silence has taught me everything, that two years’ silence sitting by your side. I have experienced. Now there is no need to say anything to me. I am yours, at your service. You have not argued, but you have conquered. You have not defeated me and yet you have defeated me.”

Understanding arises out of silence; silence means no-mind. Misunderstanding is all kinds of noise in your mind. Dharmaraj, move from mind to no-mind, from noise to silence.

The second question
Question 2
OSHO,
I AM A HYPOCRITE. WHAT SHOULD L DO? Narayandas Diwari,

IT IS GOOD, it is beautiful that you recognize, that you confess that you are a hypocrite. This is the beginning – the beginning of sincerity, the beginning of truth. Hypocrisy cannot remain long now any more. Hypocrisy can remain only if it goes on pretending that it is not hypocrisy. It exists by pretending to be that which it is not.

Once you recognize that you are wearing a mask, the mask has already started slipping. You have become aware that this is not your face. The mask can remain on your face only so long as you go on believing, pretending, deceiving others and yourself that it is your real face. And the problem is: if you deceive others you will start deceiving yourself finally. The person who goes on being cunning with others sooner or later starts being cunning with himself He forgets the language of sincerity, authenticity, truth. He has been Lying so long that all he knows now is Lying; he goes on Lying. And if others start believing in his lies – because he becomes very clever in Lying – seeing that others are believing in his lies he starts believing in those lies himself; naturally, when so many people are believing, there must be some truth in it. How can you deceive so many people? People are not such fools!

This is the greatest problem of wearing masks: they become your faces. Slowly slowly the distance between the original face and the mask disappears, they become glued together, almost welded. In fact, to separate them will feel as if you are peeling your skin – it is painful, it is surgical.

But to be with a Master is to be on a surgical table. It is surgery because much that has accumulated around you which is false has to be cut, chunk by chunk. It hurts. It has become almost your second nature – your originality is completely forgotten – it has become far more important than the original.

Hence, the first thing I would like to say to you, Narayandas, is that this is good, tremendously good, that you accept. Otherwise it is very difficult, particularly for Indians, to accept that they are hypocrites. They are all hypocrites. For centuries they have lived in hypocrisy; that has become their way of life. Their mahatmas, their saints, their so-called great men, they all live in hypocrisy; and the smaller people naturally follow the so-called great. The hypocrisy has gone into the blood, into the bones, into the marrow.

It always happens to an ancient culture, and India is one of the most ancient cultures alive – not very much alive, of course, but still breathing; vegetating, almost in a coma, but still breathing. It has not died yet. That is a misfortune that it has not died, because if it had died something new would have been born.

There have been other great cultures which have disappeared from the world. Where is Babylon, Assyria? Gone, absolutely gone. Where is the ancient civilization of Egypt? The civilization that made the pyramids has disappeared completely. The ancient Chinese civilization is no more there. Where is Greece and its great civilization, and the Roman culture? They all have disappeared.

If you look around the map of the world, the only ancient culture somehow still dragging is the Indian culture. It is so old, so crippled, so paralyzed, that it can only pretend. It has lost all courage to be true, to be adventurous, to be inquiring. It has become almost fossilized, it is a big graveyard. But somehow the people who are in the grave are not completely dead; that is the trouble. If they were dead one is finished with them. They are somehow alive and they have gathered many lies meanwhile.

Have you watched this fact? – that children are never hypocrites, they cannot be! They simply say whatsoever is the case. As they grow they start telling lies; they have to, just to survive with the grown-up people, because the all grown-up people are Lying. And slowly the child starts seeing the fact that if you want to survive you have to lie.

My own approach about it was always this: whenever my father will ask me anything I will ask him another question immediately: ”Do you want the truth? Are you ready to listen to the truth? Or you want something sweet? You decide!” If he asked me, ”Have you done this? Had you jumped into somebody’s well and were you taking bath in the well?” I will ask him immediately, ”You just tell me one thing: do you want the truth? Are you ready to hear the truth? Are you ready not to punish the truth? Otherwise I was not in the well – somebody else – then you will have to prove!”

He was a very beautiful person. He will always tell me, ”You can tell the truth and you will be protected.” And I will tell him the truth, whatsoever it was. But sometimes he himself used to get into trouble because of me.

One day he said to me that, ”You are sitting outside in the sun...” It was a winter cold morning. ”Some person is going to see me and I don’t want to see him today. He is such a bore and he will destroy my whole day, and it is very difficult to get rid of him. So you simply say him that, ’My father is not at home.’ ”

And the bore came and he asked me, ”Where is your father?”

I said, ”He is in, but he has told me to tell to the bore, because he is going to destroy his whole day, that he is not inside the house.”

He became very angry. He went inside the house, found my father and said, ”What is the matter? What is your son saying?”

I went in and my father was in trouble because that bore was one of the richest men of the town and he could do harm in many ways.

My father said, ”What have you told him?”

I said, ”Do you want the truth?”

For a moment he hesitated because now it was going to cost him, but finally he decided. He said, ”Yes, whatsoever he has said I had told him. Just I had forgotten to tell him not to tell it to you! But he did exactly the way I had told him. Now I am sorry, it was my fault. He has nothing to do with it.”

Many times he was in difficulty because of me, but never he punished me for being true. Then there was no need for me to be untrue.

The same was my approach with my teachers, but they were not so courageous. Then I would tell them lies and I would say, ”These are lies! But you want to listen lies and you protect lies and you support lies. You are creating a hypocrite in me!”

But that’s how older people become: older they are, more cunning they become. And the same happens to a civilization: the older it is, the more cunning.

For example, Americans are more honest than any country for the simple reason because they are the newest people in the world, only three hundred years of history; it is nothing compared to the Indian ancient past. Even the very realistic historians say India has existed at least for ten thousand years; about that there are enough proofs. But there are other historians, who are not so accepted, who say that India has existed at least for ninety thousand years. And there is a possibility, because in the Vedas the description of a star is such that it had happened only ninety thousand years before. The description is so exactly true that it cannot be just imagination, poetry. It is so scientifically true that it seems that the record is at least ninety thousand years old. And if the record is ninety thousand years old then the people whose record it is must have lived more than ninety thousand years. Now what is three hundred years? America is just like a small child; hence the truth, the authenticity.

You can ask an American girl, ”how many times you have made love before you got married?” and she will answer. But no Indian woman will answer; it is impossible. Her whole life will be destroyed.

You can collect such data only in America, not in India. And Indian saints go on saying, ”Look! In our country no girl ever loses her virginity” – because there is no data for it. You cannot collect data for the simple reason – not that it is true – for the simple reason that nobody is ready to say the truth. Only in America you can find such data.

You can ask all kinds of questions to people and people are willing to answer sincerely, for no other reason than just to help the scientific survey. They are ready to risk their own personal lives. You can ask American husbands how many extra-marital relationships they are having, but you cannot ask an Indian husband. He will say, ”What? Extra-marital relationships? Never thought about it, never dreamed about it!”

In the sweet young thing’s opinion the bench was far too public. Her gallant immediately suggested that they change their seat to one some distance away where it was more discreet and darker too.

”And you will promise not to hug me?” she asked coyly. Her lover nodded acquiescence.
”And you will promise not to kiss me?”
Again her lover nodded.

”Then what on earth’s the use of going over there?” demanded the girl angrily.

This is how hypocrisy goes on working: it pretends one thing, it hides just the opposite of it.

A man arrived at his local pub for a Friday night drink. Just as he was about to open the door, a nun jumped out from the shadows and said fervently, ”My son, stop before it is too late! This pub is the House of the Devil! Repent your sins and forget the demon drink!”

The man had a bright idea and said to the nun mischievously, ”How can you condemn something that you have never experienced? Have you ever tried alcohol? Have you ever felt it is health-giving and has many good properties in it?”

”Never!” she cried. ”I am a nun!”

After some very serious persuasion the drinker convinced the nun to try a little. ”But wait,” said the nun, ”in these clothes I will be recognized. Why don’t you bring some drink out to me in this old china cup?”

So the man entered the pub, walked up to the barman and said, ”Evening, Jim. Give me a pint of your best and a large gin and tonic in this cup, please.”

”By Christ!” exclaimed the barman. ”Is that old nun hanging around outside my pub again?”
It is good, Narayandas Diwari, that you say:
I AM A HYPOCRITE. WHAT SHOULD I DO?
First see it clearly, watch it, all its subtle ways, its whole mechanism. It must have gone deep. You will have to be very aware of it. And nothing else is needed to be done – because if you do something, that will create repression.

I am not in favor of much doing. My whole effort here is to help you become more aware of things. And the miracle of awareness is that whatsoever is wrong, the moment you become fully aware of it drops on its own accord, and whatsoever is right, when you become fully aware of it, it becomes your very being.

Awareness is the most alchemical phenomenon in the world.

And it is good that a recognition has happened; this is a good beginning. The seed has fallen in the soil. Just go on becoming more and more aware. Watch each act, each thought, each dream. And don’t do anything – don’t be in a hurry to do something. Just simply go on watching, taking notes what is happening inside you, how you are living your life. And slowly you will become aware of a change happening on its own accord. And when any change happens by itself it has a beauty of its own.

Osho Rajineesh: The Rebellious Spirit 2

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Realitarian-one who acknowledges reality over truth, substance over form, subjective truth over objective truth, natural over artificial and see abidance of presence in expanded awareness. FUNKTIONARY

According to FUNKTIONARY:

Realitarian - one who acknowledges reality over truth, substance over form, subjective truth over objective truth, natural over artificial, clarity over fuzziness and see abidance of presence in expanded awareness. 2) one who subscribes to the applied radical transformative Realigion of Reality-Cracking. 3) one who rigorously hacks his or her own brain (wetware) for bugs and viruses in the indoctrination program codes (memons) acquired and running throughout one's mortal consciousness in this earthuman life. (See: Suddenlightenment, Psylence, Poetic Vision, Consciousness, Slavespeak & Realigion)

Osho Rajineesh: The Rebellious Spirit 1

"language – the creation and use of abstractions manifested through speech, not writing." - FUNKTIONARY

According to FUNKTIONARY:

language – the creation and use of abstractions manifested through speech, not writing. 2) a game that is played according to internal rules that need not have any connection with the actual attributes of reality. 3) tool for either loving communication (contact), or a barrier to intimacy. 4) a vestigial remnant of man’s primordial telepathic ability. 5) an inventory of symbols with a system that ties them together. Language without the contrary and opposites loses its ability to imprint meaning. Language not only processes perceptions of knowledge and culture but also provides occasion for perceiving (and even shaping) to commence; and therefore, language is originating as well as original—creating as it is reflecting. The nation-state functions to extinguish (weed out) living languages by using plastic words, which reduces diversity and creates monocultures. Language is not only a part of the perceptual system, but, most often, a primary catalyst or thematic funktionary for perceptions. “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” –Max Weinrich. “Language is a world in and of itself, and this world is World War III.” –Karl Popper. Precise speech begets precise thought (though most people assume otherwise, i.e., vice versa). Language is about community and not merely communication, and when you have community without communication, it is like having a cult but not a culture; like being domesticated but not cultivated, or like being excavated but not really or fully understood—you dig? We are suspended and animated between one another’s languaculture. (See: Contact, Unspeak, Lie, Sign, Languaculture, Plastic Words, The Word, Waking Consciousness, Excluded Middle, Acrolect, Basilect, Linguicism, Power, Deficit Theory, Psychological Reversal, Meaning, Recall Button, Perception, Semiotics, Frames & Communication) 

'Man is a machine, he is utterly unconscious. He is nothing but the sum total of his habits. Man is not yet man: unless consciousness enters into your being, you will remain a machine.' Osho Rajineesh

From Unio Mystica, Vol 1 , Chapter 4

Talks given from 01/11/78 am to 10/11/78 am

WHY DO THE SUFIS SAY THAT MAN IS A MACHINE?

Man is a machine, that’s why. Man as he is is utterly unconscious. He is nothing but his habits, the sum total of his habits. Man is a robot. Man is not yet man: unless consciousness enters into your being, you will remain a machine.

That’s why the Sufis say man is a machine. It is from the Sufis that Gurdjieff introduced the idea to the West that man is a machine. It is very rarely that you are conscious. In your whole seventy years’ life, if you live the ordinary so-called life – healthy and whole within and without, with no pain of growth, with no pain within you of a growing pearl of exceeding beauty – then you will not know even seven moments of awareness in your whole life.

And even if you know those seven moments or less, they will be only accidental. For example, you may know a moment of awareness if somebody suddenly comes and puts a revolver on your heart. In that moment, your thinking, your habitual thinking, stops. For a moment you become aware, because it is so dangerous, you cannot remain ordinarily asleep.

In some dangerous situation you become aware. Otherwise you remain fast asleep. You are perfectly skillful at doing your things mechanically.

Just stand by the side of the road and watch people, and you will be able to see that they are all walking in their sleep. All are sleep-walkers, somnambulists. And so are you.

Two bums were arrested and charged with a murder that had been committed in the neighborhood. The jury found them guilty and the judge sentenced them to hang by their necks until dead and God have mercy on their souls.

The two bore up pretty well until the morning of the day set for the execution arrived. As they were being prepared for the gallows, one turned to the other and said, ”Dam’ me if I ain’t about off my nut. I can’t get my thoughts together. Why, I don’t even know what the day of the week is.”

”This is a Monday,” said the other bum.

”Monday? My Gawd! What a rotten way to start the week!”

Just watch yourself. Even to the very point of death, people go on repeating old habitual patterns. Now there is going to be no week; the morning has come when they are to be hanged. But just the old habit – somebody says it is Monday, and you say, ”Monday? My God! What a rotten way to start the week!”

Man reacts. That’s why the Sufis say man is a machine. Unless you start responding, unless you become responsible... Reaction comes out of the past, responses comes out of the present moment. Response is spontaneous, reaction is just old habit.

Just watch yourself. Your woman says something to you: then whatsoever you say, watch, ponder over it. Is it just a reaction? And you will be surprised: ninety-nine percent of your acts are not acts, because they are not responses, they are just mechanical. Just mechanical.

It has been happening again and again: you say the same thing and your woman reacts the same way, and then you react, and it ends in the same thing again and again. You know it, she knows it, everything is predictable.

I have heard:

”Pop,” said a boy of then, ”how do wars get started?”

”Well, son,” began Pop, ”let’s say America quarreled with England...”

”America’s not quarreling with England,” interrupted Mother.

”Who said she was?” said Pop, visibly irritated. ”I merely was giving the boy a hypothetical instance.”

”Ridiculous!” snorted Mother. ”You’ll put all sorts of wrong ideas in his head.”

”Ridiculous, nothing!” countered Pop. ”If he listens to you he’ll never have any ideas at all in his head.”

Just as the dish-throwing stage approached, the son spoke up again. ”Thanks Mom, thanks Pop. I’ll never have to ask how wars get started again.”

Just watch yourself. The things that you are doing, you have done so many times. The ways you react, you have been reacting always. In the same situation you always do the same thing. You are feeling nervous and you take out your cigarette and you start smoking. It is a reaction; whenever you have felt nervous you have done it.

You are a machine. It is just a built-in program in you now: you feel nervous, your hand goes into the pocket, the packet comes out. It is almost like a machine doing things. You take the cigarette out, you put the cigarette in your mouth, you light the cigarette, and this is all going on mechanically. This has been done millions of times, and you are doing it again.

And each time you do this it is strengthened; the machine becomes more mechanical, the machine becomes more skillful. The more you do it, the less awareness is needed to do it.

This is why the Sufis say man functions as a machine. Unless you start destroying these mechanical habits... Sufis have many methods to destroy them. For example, they teach many devices. They say: Do something just contrary to what you have always done.

Try it. You come home, you are afraid, you are as late as ever, and the wife will be there ready to quarrel with you. And you are planning how to answer, what to say – that there was too much work in the office, and this and that. And she knows all that you are planning, and she knows what you are going to say if she asks why you are late. And you know if you say that you ar elate because there was too much work she is not going to believe it either. She has never believed it. She may have already checked; she may have phoned the office, she may have already enquired where you are.

But, still, this is just a pattern. The Sufis say: Today go home and behave totally differently. The wife asks you, ”Where have you been?” And you say, ”I was with a woman making love.” And then see what happens. She will be shocked! She will not know what to say, she will not even have any way to find words to express it. For a moment she will be completely lost, because no reaction, no old pattern, is applicable.

Or maybe, if she has become too much of a machine, she will say, ”I don’t believe you!” – just as she has never believed you. ”You must be joking!”

Every day you come home...

I have heard about a psychoanalyst who was telling his patient – must have been giving him a Sufi device – ”Today when you go home...” because the patient was complaining again and again. ”I am always afraid of going home. My wife looks so miserable, so sad, always in despair, that my heart starts sinking. I want to escape from the home.”

The psychologist said, ”Maybe you are the cause of it. Do something: today take flowers and ice cream and sweets for the woman, and when she opens the door hug her, give her a good kiss. And then immediately start helping her: clean the table and the pots and the floor. Do something absolutely new that you have never done before.”

The idea was appealing and the man tried it. He went home. The moment the wife opened the door and saw flowers and ice cream and sweets, and this beaming man who had never been laughing hugged her, she could not believe what was happening! She was in an utter shock, she could not believe her eyes: maybe this is somebody else! She had to look again.

And then when he kissed her and immediately just started cleaning the table and went to the sink and started washing the pots, the woman started crying. When he came out he said, ”Why are you crying?” She said, ”Have you gone mad? I always suspected one day or other you would go mad. Now it has happened. Why don’t you go and see a psychiatrist?”

Sufis have such devices. They say: Act totally differently, and not only will others be surprised, YOU will be surprised. And just in small things. For example, when you are nervous you walk fast. Don’t walk fast, go very slow and see. You will be surprised that it doesn’t fit, that your whole mechanical mind immediately says, ”What are you doing? You have never done this!” And if you walk slowly you will be surprised: nervousness disappears, because you have brought in something new.

These are the methods of vipassana and zazen. If you go deep into them the fundamentals are the same. When you are doing vipassana walking, you have to walk more slowly than you have ever walked before, so slowly that it is absolutely new. The whole feeling is new, and the reactive mind cannot function. It cannot function because it has no program for it; it simply stops functioning.

That’s why in vipassana you feel so silent watching the breath. You have always breathed but you have never watched it; this is something new. When you sit silently and just watch you breath – coming in, going out, coming in, going out – the mind feels puzzled: what are you doing? Because you have never done it. It is so new that the mind cannot supply an immediate reaction to it. Hence it falls silent.

The fundamental is the same. Whether Sufi or Buddhist or Hindu or Mohammedan is not the question. If you go deep into meditation’s fundamentals then the essential thing is one: how to de-automatize you.

Gurdjieff used to do very bizarre things to his disciples. Somebody would come who had always been a vegetarian, and he would say, ”Eat meat.” Now, it is the same fundamental – this man is just a little too much of himself, a little eccentric. He would say, ”Eat meat.” Now, watch a vegetarian eating meat. The whole body wants to throw it out and he wants to vomit, and the whole mind is puzzled and disturbed and he starts perspiring, because the mind has no way to cope with it.

That’s what Gurdjieff wanted to see, how you would react to a new situation. To the man who had never taken any alcohol Gurdjieff would say, ”Drink. Drink as much as you can.”

And to the man who had been drinking alcohol Gurdjieff would say, ”Stop for one month. Completely stop.”

He wanted to create some situation which is so new for the mind that the mind simply falls silent; it has no answer for it, no ready-made answer for it.

The mind functions in a parrot-like way.

That’s why Zen masters will hit the disciple sometimes. That is again the same fundamental. Now, when you go to a master you don’t expect a buddha to hit you, or do you? When you go to Buddha you go with expectations that he will be compassionate and loving, that he will shower love and put his hand on your head. And this buddha gives you a hit – takes his staff and hits you hard on the head. Now, it is so shocking: a buddha, hitting you? For a moment the mind stops; it has no idea what to do, it does not function.

And that nonfunctioning is the beginning. Sometimes a person has become enlightened just because the master did something absurd.

People have expectations, people live through expectations. They don’t know that masters don’t fit with any kind of expectations.

India was accustomed to Krishna and Rama and people like that. Then came Mahavira, he stood naked. You cannot think of Krishna standing naked; he was always wearing beautiful clothes, as beautiful as possible. He was one of the most beautiful persons ever; he used to wear ornaments made of gold and diamonds.

And then suddenly there is Mahavira. What did Mahavira mean by being naked? He shocked the whole country: he helped many people because of that shock.

Each master has to decide how to shock. Now, in India they have not known a man like me for centuries. So whatsoever I do, whatsoever I say, is a shock. The whole country goes into shock; a great shiver runs through the spine of the whole country. I really enjoy it, because they cannot think....

I have just received a letter saying, ”We always thought that you were above politics. Then why have you started speaking on politics?”

That’s why, because I am above it. Who else can speak about it? Those who are in it, they cannot speak about it – they are partisans.

The man who is on the hilltop has a far better vision of the valley down below. The bird who is on the wing can see all that is happening on the earth; he has more perspective, more vision.

I can see in a better way, because I am no more part of the valley. I can see what is happening in the valley, I can see what is happening in New Delhi, because I am far above it. But the Indian mind has its accustomed expectations. A saint is not supposed to speak about politics. But a saint in fact never follows anybody’s expectations.

I am not here to fulfill your expectations. If I fulfill your expectations I will never be able to transform you. I am here to destroy all your expectations, I am here to shock you. And in those shocking experiences your mind will stop. You will not be able to figure it out: and that is the point where something new enters you.

So once in a while I say something which Indians think should not be said. But who are you to decide what I should say and what I should not say? And naturally, when something goes against their expectations they immediately react according to their old conditionings. Those who react according to their old conditionings miss the point. Those who don’t react according to the old conditionings fall silent, get into a new space.

I am talking to my disciples: I am trying to hit them, this way and that. It is all deliberate. When I criticize Morarji Desai it is not so much about Morarji Desai. It is much more about the Morarji Desai in YOU, because everybody has the politician within them. Hitting Morarji Desai I have hit the Morarji Desai in you, the politician within you.

Everybody has the politician in them. The politician means the desire to dominate, the desire to be number one. The politician means ambition, the ambitious mind. And when I hit Morarji Desai, if you feel hit and you start thinking, ”This man cannot be a really enlightened person, otherwise why should he be hitting Morarji Desai so hard?” you are simply rationalizing. You have nothing to do with Morarji Desai: you are saving your own Morarji Desai inside, you are trying to protect your own politician.

I have nothing to do with Morarji Desai. What can I have to do with poor Morarji Desai? But I have everything to do with the politician within you.

The Sufis say man is a machine because man only reacts according to the programs that have been fed to him. Start behaving responsively, and then you are not a machine. And when you are not a machine you are a man: then the man is born.

Watch, become alert, observe, and go on dropping all the reactive patterns in you. Each moment try to respond to the reality – not according to the ready-made idea in you but according to the reality as it is there outside. Respond to the reality! Respond with your total consciousness but not with your mind.

And then when you respond spontaneously and you don’t react, action is born. Action is beautiful, reaction is ugly. Only a man of awareness acts, the man of unawareness REACTS. Action liberates. Reaction goes on creating the same chains, goes on making them thicker and harder and stronger.

Live a life of response and not of reaction.

Osho Rajineesh: The Empty Boat Chapter 9 -11 (audio)

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"YOYO – You’re On Your Own. You are not alone—but you are most certainly on your own." - FUNKTIONARY

According to FUNKTIONARY:

YOYO – You’re On You Own. You are not alone—but you are most certainly on your own. Until you realize that in your life YOYO, your guest appearance in this movie-like-life (the Passing Show) will continue to be characterized by bouts of highs and lows, ups and downs, illusions and delusions, negativity, self-deception, self-denials and self-betrayals. Welcome to the real world—naked out and naked in. Welcome to the mean world—I will rush in like the wind. (See: Passing Show & Self-Realization) 

Osho Rajineesh: The Empty Boat Chapter 6 -8 (audio)

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"Why camouflage yourselves w/truth when reality pierces all guises and disguises? If you know the difference btw the nature of truth and the nature of reality, all else is mere formality" -FUNKTIONARY

According to "FUNKTIONARY:

Truth-Based Truth – an infinite regression of truth that begins and ends in truth. It does not stand-alone but is true if and only if other truths are true. It is illegitimate, inauthentic, arbitrarily erratic, error-prone, obsessive, and presumes divine authority or logical foundations in eternal verities. Why camouflage yourselves with truth when reality pierces all guises and disguises? If you know the difference between the nature of truth and the nature of reality, all else is mere formality. (See: Reality-Based Truth, Eternal Verities, Proof, Axiom, Subjective Truth, Bi-Polar Truth, Truth Editor, Limits, Certainty, Perfection, Impermanence, Uncertainty, Dream-Past, Literal Present, Change, Coercion, Fear & Absolute Truth)

truth decay - the inability or unwillingness to drop old truths for new. 2) holding onto objective truth in the face of subjective truth. Prevent reality-decay, drop a truth a day. The purer the truth the more subjective it is and the further away it moves from the grasp of our complete understanding. The more subtle the truth, the more impractical and incompatible it becomes for us in our everyday existence became it comes closer to reality---slippery, dynamic, incomplete and uncertain. We are accustomed to living hand-me-down objective and absolute truths that fly in the face of the nature of reality. (See: Subjective Truth, Absolute Truth, Objective Truth, Reality-Based Truth, Truth Editing & Inner Truth)

Truth defenders - promoters of truth's illusions of certainty and permanency in the face of reality-as-infinity. Behind the noble facade of defending truth lurks a hidden agenda for subduing the masses with rabid dogma. In seeking to control others, truth defenders resort to the colossal untruth of "eternal verities." We should despise people who use truth to tell lies. Eternal verities have a built-in diabolical cleverness: truth that cannot be challenged is also the most quickly or readily swallowed. Whether by conspiracy or human nature, unprovable truth is our favorite brand of truth. Truth-defenders meet their match with their arch-nemesis: the "truth-upenders!" The "truth-upenders" expose the truth for what it is in reality. There is no greater lie than truth which refutes reality. Any truth shares in that lie to the extent it implies certainty, permanence, or perfection. Truth-defenders preach that truth is eternal and universal in refutation of reality's attributes. Learning to separate truth-based authority opinion from the obvious and directly experiential facts of reality is not that difficult. Just turn your head and face reality and persuade the truth-seekers, truth-talkers and truth-defenders to look within reality for the troths they think exist. No one can pluck relativity out of reality. Everything is connected and therefore relative. Promoters of truth's illusions never spend much time, if any, probing and exploring the quantum nature of reality. Most of them are in search of a truth that he or she has not the courage to seek on his own, but find it easier to condemn one who has seen behind the facade of truth's illusions and the nature of truth and reality. (See: Truth, Mass Truth, Absolute Truth, Nimbus Truth, Truthseekers, Truth Seekers & Quantum Reality)