NAMASTE

Satyam...

"Am I a real friend to somebody?"

It is not a question of using the other, it is not even a question of needing the other, it is a question of sharing. You have too much and you would like to share. And whosoever is ready to share your joy with you, your dance, your song, you will be grateful to him, you will feel obliged. Not that he is obliged to you, not that he should feel thankful to you because you have given so much to him. A friend never thinks in that way. A friend always feels grateful to those people who allow him to love them, to give them whatsoever he has got.

This whole existence has to be befriended! And if you can befriend existence, existence will befriend you a thousandfold. It returns to you in the same coin but multiplied. It echoes you. If you throw stones at existence you will be getting back many more stones. If you throw flowers, flowers will be coming back.

ife is a mirror, it reflects your face. Be friendly, and all of life will reflect friendliness. People know perfectly well that if you are friendly to a dog even the dog becomes friendly to you, so friendly. And there are people who have known that if you are friendly to a tree, the tree becomes friendly to you.

Try great experiments in friendships. Try with a rosebush, and see the miracle: slowly slowly, it will happen, because man has not been behaving with trees in a friendly way; hence they have become very much afraid.

Have you ever said hello to a tree? Try it, and one day you will be surprised: the tree also says hello in her tongue, in her own language. Hug a tree, and a day will come soon when you will feel that it was not only you who were hugging the tree -- the tree was responding, you were also hugged by the tree, although the tree has no hands. But it has its own way of expressing its joy, its sadness, its anger, its fear.

The whole existence is sensitive. That's what I mean when I say that existence is God.
Be friendly, Satyam, and don't be worried whether anybody is friendly towards you or not -- that is a businesslike question. Why be worried? Why not transform the whole existence into a friend towards you? Why miss such a great kingdom?

SHOULD ONE TRY TO BE RICH OR NOT?

Why bother whether you are rich or not? In fact, people go into unnecessary worries. Whatsoever you have, enjoy it -- it is already too much. You cannot look at it because your mind is constantly occupied with doing this, becoming that. And all that existence goes on giving you, you go on neglecting. You never even thank existence for it; you don't have any gratitude. Otherwise, even if you don't possess anything, you can live a very rich life.

A rich life is something inner. And I am not against outer things, remember, but basically a rich life is something inner. If you are inwardly rich you can make even outer things richer by your inner light.

For example, if the buddha lives in a hut, he lives in the hut as if the hut is a palace. If the buddha lives in the palace, of course he will be able to enjoy the palace more than anybody else in the world. If he can enjoy the hut as a palace, what to say about the palace itself? Wherever he is he finds ways to enjoy life.

The whole art of sannyas is to live a rich life -- but the richness comes through your inner awareness. You can live a very poor life and you can be very rich outwardly; you can have a big bank balance, but you can live a dog's life.

You don't possess the stars, still you can enjoy them. Or do you first have to possess them, and only then you will be able to enjoy them? You don't possess the birds in the sky, but you can enjoy them.

What you need is not more possessions. What you need is more sensitiveness, more aesthetic sensibility, more musical ears, more artistic eyes. What you need is a vision which transforms everything into something significant and meaningful.

You ARE rich! You have been given already that which you need. Let it grow, and then whatsoever you have on the outside will be enough.

Namaste

NAMASTE

In search of the ultimate new

Osho
Satyam Shivam Sundram
Truth Godliness Beauty

In search of the ultimate new

You suddenly find yourself ignorant, helpless, not knowing what to do; hence the scariness. Otherwise, instead of being afraid you would have a totally different experience with the new. You will explode with joy. If you are an explorer, an adventurer, then the new will fill you with tremendous ecstasy, and you will see in this new a possibility for your intelligence to function.

With the old, the intelligence has no need to function. Your memory functions. You know the answer already; the answer is part of your memory system. But memory is not intelligence, remember.

Intelligence is the capacity to rejoice in the new with openhearted welcome, with intense clarity. Just by watching the new, from your very innermost core will arise the response. That is the way of the meditator. The meditator is continuously confronted with the new. In fact, he is in search of the ultimate new, which will never become old, which will always be fresh.

That is the quality of satyam, shivam, sundram. Truth is never old; neither is the godliness that surrounds you from all dimensions, nor the experience of beauty. The roses may come and go, the expressions of beauty may come and disappear, but the experience of beauty is always there exactly the same.

Mind loves the old. With the old the mind is very at ease because it knows all the answers. It does not feel helpless; it does not feel that it has to choose this way or that way. It knows exactly what is the right answer. The mind never wants you to come in contact with the new; it keeps you going round and round with the old.

Meditation is just the opposite of mind. As mind is confined to the old, meditation is an exploration of the expansion of the whole universe. The meditator wants to come each moment to the new, because only with the new does his intelligence become more sharp; only with the new does he himself become new. Only with the new is the way towards the ultimate.

The memory is not part of your consciousness; the memory is part of your body. The memory is just a mechanism like any computer: you feed it with information and whatever you feed it, it is perfectly comfortable with. It knows it. And knowledge gives you a certain power. You are within the territory where you are the ruler, you know everything.

The unknown, the new, suddenly exposes your ignorance, and that hurts. You don’t want to know your ignorance; that’s why the new is scary. But your ignorance is enormous; your knowledge is just a dewdrop. If you don’t want to remain a dewdrop, closed, absolutely nonreceptive and insensitive to the tremendous existence that is available to be yours any moment, gather courage and come out of your smallness. The moment the dewdrop takes a jump into the ocean... that’s exactly the situation of a man who takes a jump from the mind into meditation.

Mind is so small. Existence, life, is so vast, so infinite that unless you come out of the mind you will live the life of a prisoner and a slave. A slave cannot know what dance is, a slave cannot know what freedom is and the joy of freedom and the blissfulness and the ecstasy of being vast, oceanic.

It is cozy and it is comfortable to live in the old, but it will not bring the flowers of freedom and it will not open the whole sky for you to open your wings and fly. It will not allow you to have aspirations for the stars; it will not allow you to move in any direction or dimension. You will remain just like a dead grave where nothing moves.

You will have to shift your emphasis from mind to meditation, and all fear will disappear. You will have to shift your attention from your comfortable, cozy, but old and dirty and rotten state towards something new, fresh, young – from the body to the consciousness, from mind to no-mind. Then every moment you are confronting the new.

The day you start searching for the new with joy and a dancing heart, you have become a sannyasin. That is my definition of a sannyasin.

Therapy, hipnosis and meditation

Osho
Satyam Shivam Sundram
Truth Godliness Beauty

Therapy, hypnosis and meditation

THE OTHER MORNING IN DISCOURSE, FOR A FEW MOMENTS I FELT AS IF MY FACE WERE DISAPPEARING. IT WAS A VERY PLEASANT SENSATION, AND, AT THE SAME TIME, A FEELING OF ASTONISHMENT AND SURPRISE AROSE. WOULD YOU PLEASE SAY SOMETHING ABOUT THIS?

it was not your original face that was disappearing; what was disappearing was your mask. Only the mask can disappear. The original face can be covered, but it cannot by any means be made to disappear. The mask is used to cover your face; we have many masks and we go on changing them as the situation requires.

If you are seeing your servant, you have one kind of mask. You are the master. When you are facing your boss, you have a different mask; although he is humiliating you, you are still smiling. The original face cannot smile, so it is only a mask; deep down you are cursing but you have to smile; otherwise your job is in danger.

This is my only longing, to see you in your original faces. Let these masks disappear; just become yourself and you will feel light, you will enjoy it. The first time you may feel astonished, but as it will go on happening again and again, astonishment will disappear and the pleasantness will become deeper. A moment comes when a person becomes
absolutely original. Then his whole life is full of blissfulness.

You have been forced to wear masks because you are expected to behave in a certain way, to talk in a certain way, to dress in a certain way. You don’t have any freedom. The society imposes on you a complete imprisonment, from all nooks and corners. This is your slavery and this is your misery. This is your pain and this is your hell.

Get out of all this falseness and just be simple – as simple as the birds singing, as simple as the trees enjoying the sun, as simple as small children.

Become an outsider

Osho
Satyam Shivam Sundram
Truth Godliness Beauty

Become an outsider

To be a sannyasin is to be a stranger. To be a sannyasin is to be an outsider.

You do not belong anymore to the crowd; you have chosen the path of a lion, to be alone, rather than the path of a sheep, to be always in the crowd. Now that it is happening to you, that you are beginning to love your aloneness, a fear is also arising that you may become a stranger; you may lose contact with others.

There is certainly a fear in the beginning, because the more you become a stranger, the more you are condemned; the more you become a stranger, the more you feel yourself without any support. You were always supported and you have forgotten that you can stand on your own; there is no need of any support. In fact all supports have made you crippled. If a child is supported, carried from the very beginning, he will never learn to walk on his own.

I say unto you: first and foremost, love yourself. And if you can love yourself, others will start getting your love very naturally, without any pretensions, very spontaneously. A man full of love soon starts overflowing. You cannot contain your love into the small space you have within you; your love is far greater than you are. Your love can fill the whole earth. A single man’s love can fill the whole universe. It is so vast that you can go on sharing with everybody.

But if you’re very source remains closed, then all that is left is to pretend. Everybody is pretending; that’s why there is so much talk about love, so much poetry, so much literature. And if you look around, you don’t find love anywhere, you never encounter it.

I want the whole universe to be a loving, rejoicing universe. But I see where humanity has failed, where its teachers, messengers of God and saviors have taken a wrong route. They listened to logic and they forgot that logic is absolutely man-made; it has nothing to do with your nature. Nature has no obligation to fulfill logical conclusions. If your nature can be heard, it will become a simple thing to understand.

Love yourself, so that all your loving sources become open, all blocks are removed. And if you can love yourself, with all your frailties, with all your weaknesses, with all your errors, you can love anybody in the world. You will have tremendous compassion and understanding, because you commit the same mistakes; the same are your errors, the same are your frailties.

Once you become an outsider, settled, confirmed, you will be surprised that now authentic contacts start happening, because now you are in contact with your own being. You have such a magnetic pull that those who are seeking, those who are searching, those who are longing for something to happen in their life – those who don’t want to live an empty and meaningless life will start coming in contact with you.

This contact will have some great significance. You will be fulfilling each other without destroying each other. You will be loving but not possessive. You will help but you will not enslave. You will support – but not to exploit; just out of your love, friendliness, out of your understanding, whatever happens will be right.

This is your moment, just as it is my moment.

Rejoice in being a stranger; rejoice in being an outsider. That is your way to satyam, shivam, sundram. That is the way which will bring you the truth, and the divine, and the tremendous splendor and beauty that follows on its own accord.

Love: the conscious path of the ego

Osho
Satyam Shivam Sundram
Truth Godliness Beauty

Love: the conscious path of the ego

Love is almost like a death. When you die your physical body dies and you don’t experience it, because most of the times you die after you have gone into unconsciousness, so you don’t feel your death. Only people whose meditation has become complete can see their death, because they don’t go into unconsciousness.

The fear is, if you replace the word love with death... Love is a conscious death, not of the body but of the ego. The ego has been dominating you for many births, for many lives. Its domination has become almost permanent. Love is the only experience that can dethrone it.

If in love you cannot lose your ego, then you can never lose it. And you are not the ego, remember; it is a false idea of yourself, accepted and acquired in ignorance. In love you need humbleness, in love a trust arises on its own. The person you love, you can expose yourself to in total vulnerability. But you don’t know that with love this shadow is always there, that it is a kind of death.

Particularly your personality feels immensely troubled that you are in such deep love.

So as far as I can see there is no division in you; it is just that you don’t understand the relationship between love and fear. It is absolutely natural for every person who loves to feel fear, because he does not know that love is nothing but a graveyard for your ego, and because you are identified with the ego you think it is going to be your death.

All this may not be on the conscious level; it may be going on underneath, in the darkness, in the unconscious part of your psychology.

On the conscious level you think perhaps you are split into two opposing camps. They are not opposing camps; they are two branches of the same tree, but the tree is hidden in the unconscious and you see only the branches in the conscious. Naturally, they look like two separate things.

So the first thing is to understand exactly that love is death of the ego, the personality, the false. There is no way to have both, love and ego. Either you can have the ego or you can have love – but make it a conscious thing.

Everybody is afraid of love; that’s why even lovers keep a little distance, and even lovers go on fighting so that the distance remains. They never come too close, where they can become one, because becoming one means you have lost yourself. That is your ego influencing you. Unless love is big enough that you can become one with the beloved, your love will remain absolutely incomplete, and you will remain in this split between love and fear.

Now move your energy more towards love and leave the fear without energy. It will die by itself. It is only a shadow.

This great adventure

Osho
Satyam Shivam Sundram
Truth Godliness Beauty

This great adventure

Revolution – Rebellion - What is the difference?

Revolution is a crowd, a mob phenomenon. Revolution is a struggle for power: one class of people who are in power are thrown out by the other class of people who have been oppressed, exploited to such a point that now even death does not matter. They don’t have anything. Revolution is a struggle between the haves and the have-nots.

Rebellion is individual action; it has nothing to do with the crowd. Rebellion has nothing to do with politics, power, violence. Rebellion has something to do with changing your consciousness, your silence, your being. It is a spiritual metamorphosis.

And each individual passing through a rebellion is not fighting with anybody else, but is fighting only with his own darkness. Swords are not needed, bombs are not needed; what is needed is more alertness, more meditativeness, more love, more prayerfulness, more gratitude. Surrounded by all these qualities you are born anew.

I teach this new man, and this rebellion can become the womb for the new man I teach. We have tried collective efforts and they have failed. Now let us try individual efforts. And if one man becomes aflame with consciousness, joy and blissfulness, he will become contagious to many more.

Rebellion is a very silent phenomenon that will go on spreading without making any noise and without even leaving any footprints behind. It will move from heart to heart in deep silences, and the day it has reached to millions of people without any bloodshed, just the understanding of those millions of people will change our old primitive animalistic ways.

Unless there is a rebelliousness spreading from individual to individual, unless we can create an atmosphere of enlightenment around the world where greed will fall down on its own accord, where anger will not be possible, where violence will become impossible, where love will be just the way you live... where life should be respected, where the body should be loved, appreciated, where comfort should not be condemned. It is natural to ask for comfort.

Even the trees... In Africa, trees grow very high; the same trees in India don’t grow that high. I was puzzled, what happens? I was trying to find out why they should grow to the same height but they don’t, and the reason I found was that unless there is a density of trees, trees won’t grow high. Even at a lesser height the sun is available, and that is their comfort, that is their life, that is their joy. In Africa the jungles are so thick that every tree tries in every way to grow as high as possible, because only then can it have the joy of the sun, the joy of the rain, the joy of the wind. Only then can it dance; otherwise there is nothing but death.

All the revolutions were based on ”no.” They were negative, they were against
something, they were destructive, they were revengeful and violent.
My rebellion is life-affirmative. I want you to dance and sing and love and live as intensely as possible and as totally as possible. In this total affirmation of life, in this absolute yes to nature we can bring a totally new earth and a totally new humanity into being.

The past was ”no.”
The future has to be ”yes.”

We have lived enough with the no, we have suffered enough and there has been nothing but misery. I want people to be as joyful as birds singing in the morning, as colorful as flowers, as free as the bird on the wing with no bondages, with no conditioning, with no past – just an open future, an open sky and you can fly to the stars.

The people who love to say yes, who understand the meaning of rebellion, will not be alone; they will be individuals. But the people who are on the same path, fellow-travelers, friends, will be supporting each other in their meditativeness, in their joy, in their dance, in their music. They will become a spiritual orchestra, where so many people are playing instruments but creating one music. So many people can be together and yet they may be creating the same consciousness, the same light, the same joy, the same fragrance.

My sannyasin’s function is not to be missionaries, but to be so loving, compassionate, such fragrant individuals... It is not a question of converting people from one ideology to another ideology. It is a far deeper transformation – from the whole past to a totally new and unknown future. It is the greatest adventure that one can think of.

You are fortunate to be part of this great adventure.

Just Learn to be

Osho
Satyam Shivam Sundram
Truth Godliness Beauty

Just learn to be aware in all situations

INSIDE, THERE IS SOMETHING THAT I CANNOT LOOK AT, I CAN ONLY BE IT. AND THEN I AM AT THE CENTER OF EXPERIENCING MY MIND, MY BODY, AND WHAT COMES TO MY SENSES. THIS FEELS ECSTATIC, YET IS VERY SUBTLE, AND EASILY DISAPPEARS WHEN I AGAIN IDENTIFY WITH WHAT IS EXPERIENCED. IS THIS MY MIND ENTERING BY A BACK DOOR, OR AM I GOING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION?

The experience that you are going through happens to everyone when he first comes into contact with his being. Our whole experience of the past is of identification. When you are full of anger, you don’t say, “I see anger in my mind” you say, “I am angry” In fact you are not angry, you are just a watcher. The anger is on the screen of the mind.

But identification is the greatest spiritual disease. We get very easily identified because for centuries that has been our habit. So when for the first time you get out of identification, you become centered, naturally you cannot see your being, just as you cannot see your eyes.

To see your eyes you need a mirror and to see your being you need a master, or someone who is already totally centered. In his presence you may be able to see reflected – just as in a mirror things are reflected – your being. But you cannot see directly your being.

I have been telling you many functions of the master. This is one of the most subtle and perhaps the last function. The master is already settled. You are wavering: one moment you are at the center, then you can see your body and your mind and your thoughts and feelings. There is a gap between you and your body-mind system. But the gap is very small and very fresh, and the habit of being identified is very old and very strong.

So one moment you feel you are the being... but the very desire to see the being disturbs the whole thing. You cannot see it. You need a mirror to see it, and no ordinary mirror will do. You need a mirror of consciousness... And then too you will not be seeing your being, just the reflection of it. In the completely silent and settled lake of somebody’s consciousness, you may be able to see a reflection of your being.

But to try to see your being alone is not possible; it just is not in the nature of things. You can be the being – you are the being. You can experience the ecstasy of being there at the very center; you can feel immense joy, fulfillment, contentment. But the moment the desire to see it arises you have already slipped out of it, you have come back into the mind.

Because the gap is very small you will not even be aware when you are slipping. But it is a tremendously significant experience that you are going through. If the gap is small today, tomorrow it may be bigger. If the gap has already happened, the day is not far away when the desire to see yourself will disappear.

You will simply be yourself, full of ecstasy. And as you become centered, everything else – your body, your mind, your thoughts – will go on becoming farther away from you. Just a little patience, and just a little awareness...