Chapter #16 Even Bein Gawd Ain T A Bed Of Roses #16

OSHO : Anand means bliss; stefano means a garland.

Man can be either just a heap of flowers or he can be a garland. And there is a great difference between the two. A heap of flowers has no integrity, there is no center to it, it is just the circumference. There is nothing that can hold it together, it is just a crowd. The garland means that the heap is no more a crowd. It had found a thread that runs through all the flowers and makes them one whole, one piece.

To be just a heap of flowers is to be in misery and to become a garland is to be in bliss. Man ordinarily is multi-psychic, a crowd. There are many men in one man, and they are all running in different directions. Each moment a different man is on top of you, manipulating, enforcing his will, and the next moment he is gone and somebody else has taken his place.

Buddha says man is like a wheel with many spokes. The wheel is moving -- one moment one spoke is on top, the next moment it has gone down and another spoke is on top, and so on, so forth. This way of life is sheer wastage, because you can't know who you are, you are lost in the inner crowd of millions of thoughts and desires and memories and imaginations and dreams. One has to become a center, a crystallized soul, and that is possible only if you can find a thread.

It can be found either through love or through meditation; there is no other way. These two are the only possible ways. In intense, passionate love the crowd melts and you become one. In the heat of love your fragments disappear, you become an individual, literally. Individual means indivisible.

Or it can be found through meditation, through awareness. If one remains aware in each moment, in each act, then awareness becomes the thread running through your whole life. Day in, day out, slowly slowly, you are no more a heap of flowers but a garland. And only a garland can be accepted by God

Life is an opportunity to become a garland. We bring with us the whole potential to be that but we never work it out. Being a sannyasin means the beginning of great work upon yourself -- and the work is of love, of meditation, of becoming an integrated soul.

George Gurdjieff used to say that people don't have souls. He was right in a sense, because people don't have a center. They are many. Unless you become one you can't have a center and without a center how can you have a soul? The soul grows at the center of your being. But people are hollow at the very center, empty, and that emptiness comes because we are not working out our potential.

They say that even the greatest geniuses actualize only fifteen percent of their potential; an Albert Einstein for example, actualizes only fifteen percent. Giants of science, literature, music, art never go beyond that limit. Only a Buddha, a Jesus, a Krishna reach the ultimate limit. They actualize their totality, a hundred percent, and that is the goal of a sannyasin: self-realization.

OSHO (to Jagdish) : My sannyas is totally different from the old idea of sannyas. In fact it is diametrically opposite to it. The old idea of sannyas was life-denying. It was basically anti-life hence it failed. It could not succeed. It was bound to fail, nothing which goes against life can ever succeed. It is trying to swim upstream. Yes, for a few months you can fight and you may even win a few battles, but you cannot win the war. Ultimately you will become tired and the current will take you away.

But there is a great attraction in going upstream, in going against life. The attraction is that it creates ego, the more you fight with the natural instincts, the more you create ego. Ego is an unnatural phenomenon, no animal knows anything about it. It is an absolutely human invention. No animal can know about it because no animal ever tries to go against nature. All animals -- and trees and rocks and mountains and rivers and stars -- they all live in absolute harmony with nature, hence there is no question of ego. When you live in harmony with nature, how can you think of yourself as separate? The harmony is so deep: you dance with the rhythm of the whole, you sing the song of the whole, you pulsate in tune with the whole. You cannot feel yourself separate in any way. It is only man that has the capacity to fight against nature, and because he has the capacity to fight against nature he can create a very dangerous thing: the ego.

And once you have created the ego it needs constant food. You have to go on fighting more and more and more. The fight can be worldly, the fight can be other-worldly, but the fight is necessary for the existence of the ego. That's why the ego always requires more and more and more and is never contented: because contentment will mean suicide. It can exist only with discontent, it can exist only if it goes on goading you.

If you are after money then it says "More." If you are after power, it says "More." If you are after meditation it says "More." It never bothers about what the object of your desire is; its only interest is that you remain trapped with more. More is its gestalt.

The old sannyas was egoistic -- it was bound to be. Of course those egos were very subtle, they were not as gross as when you have much money, or you are a prime minister or a president of a country. These are gross ways of the ego; the politician is the grossest human being on the earth. The saints have very subtle egos: they are holy, holier-than-thou. They look at other people as sinners. It is these egoistic people who have created the idea of original sin; they had to create it to condemn others and to feel good that they had overcome it.

In fact they called people who were living naturally sinners, and people who were living ascetic lives, unnatural lives, perverted lives were worshipped as saints, mahatmas. This whole trip of the past has failed, utterly failed. We need a new concept of sannyas, because sannyas in itself is such a beautiful phenomenon. If one particular idea of it has failed there is no need to lose hope. We can give a new color, a new shape, a new form, a new gestalt to sannyas. That's what I am doing here.

My sannyas is life-affirmative. It is yea-saying to existence in all its beauty, its variety and richness. It is saying yes to the body, to the earth, to the mundane life, to ordinary life.

The moment you say yes to ordinary life you have transformed its quality, it is no more ordinary. It becomes extraordinary. The moment you say yes to the mundane life it becomes sacred. It is yes that confers sacredness on everything.

My sannyas means YES, a total yes! Such affirmation that there is no denial -- subtle, gross, conscious, unconscious -- on any plane. It means flowing with the river not fighting with it, because it is already going to the ocean.

Nature comes out of God, goes back into God; there is no need to be impatient. The old sannyas was very impatient, and impatience is one of the qualities of the ego. There is an old story....

A very old saint is chanting under a tree, but his face is angry. Although he is chanting there is no grace; although he is calling God's name and praying and bowing down, there seems to be no surrender. His surrender is also a way of fighting, a way of will: he is trying to achieve something through it.

Narda passes him -- he is going to paradise -- he asks the old man, "I am going to God; have you anything to ask? I can ask for you, on your behalf...."

He says "Yes, certainly I have something to ask. For three lives together I have been doing all kinds of austerities, I have gone through all kinds of sacrifices. I have tortured myself as much as is humanly possible. I have fasted, I have stood for years, walked for thousand of miles, done all kinds of pilgrimages, and nothing has happened yet -- no enlightenment! Ask him how much longer I have to wait? I am getting tired of it. I have heard that God is just, but lately a great suspicion has been arising in me: Where is justice? What more does he want me to do? I have put everything at the stake. I have renounced my family, all my worldly things, and still I am not getting anywhere."

Narda says "I will ask."

Just as he moves away from the old saint, he comes across a young man, a young sannyasin -- he must have been my sannyasin, it can't be otherwise. He is dancing, with his ektara, a one-stringed instrument, he is singing and dancing, and he is utterly blissful, ecstatic.

Narda asks him, just jokingly, "That old man has something to ask and I am carrying his message to God. Have you also got something to enquire about, young man?" But the young man does not listen. He is not there. He is so utterly lost in the dance and the song that Narda has to shake him physically to bring him down to earth.

The young man says "Why? Why are you disturbing me? What do you want?"

He says "I am going to God -- don't you want to enquire about anything, about yourself, your future, your enlightenment?"

The young man says, "He knows far better, so whatsoever is right will go one happening. Whatsoever is right has been already happening. I have no will of my own and no questions."

Narda came back. He saw the old man and told him, "I asked God and he said three more lives."

The old man had been worshipping the statue of God; he threw that statue away... he was really mad, and he said, "This is too much! I can't wait that long."

Narda went to the young man and said "Although you did not ask, out of curiosity I asked myself. When he said three lives for the old man, I asked him `What about the young man?' He said `It is better not to ask,' and now I know why he said it. But I insisted, so he told me, `That young man will have to be born again as many times as there are leaves on the tree under which he is dancing.'"

And the young man bowed down and he said, "So it is not very far! Because in this forest, how many trees are there? And how many leaves on each tree? And if you think of the whole earth, how many leaves! And if you think of all the earths in the universe, how many leaves! Just these few leaves on the tree? Then it is not too far. It seems I have almost arrived." And he started dancing again!

And, the story says, he immediately became enlightened. Even against the statement of God, he immediately became enlightened!

That patience, that trust, that surrender, is sannyas! Trust life, surrender to life, love life, because life is God to me. And the whole rainbow of life, all the seven colors and all the notes of music, from the lowest to the highest is nothing but pure God! And if we can love life there is no need for any other worship, there is no need for any other prayer, no need for any ritual, any religion.

Secondly, my effort here is to create a religionless religion. By religionless religion I mean religion which will not be Christian, Hindu, Mohammedan. It will be pure religiousness, a quality of your inner being that has nothing to do with any creed, dogma or belief. Hence my religion cannot have any adjectives. And if we can conceive a religionless religion then humanity is ready for a great step into the unknown. It is finished with Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism; they have done their work and they have done their harm too and humanity needs to say goodbye to all of them. We need a universal, diffused kind of religiousness... a quality, not a creed.

And I am happy that you have come! Much is going to happen for me and for my work through you! Become a conscious vehicle, a medium for me. I need thousands of mediums because I am not going anywhere -- even to come out of my room is too much effort. So I need many many many people, people who are so attuned with me that they can speak on my behalf, they can allow me to speak through them. And you have to be one of them. Remember it -- it is a great responsibility.

OSHO (to Zeno) : Let bliss be your meditation. Think of bliss and of blissful moments. Stop thinking about misery. Don't go on remembering miserable things; as they happen, forget all about them. They are not worth collecting. People collect garbage. People are really insane, they go on throwing away gems, diamonds, emeralds, and they go on collecting garbage.

People collect all that is miserable and they go on forgetting that which is blissful. Naturally their life slowly slowly becomes pessimistic, hopeless; then they live in despair. That is their own choice. If every child were taught to drop miserable moments and make a treasury of all blissful things that happen.... And millions of blissful things happen but when we have been brought up with a very wrong approach towards life: we collect wounds, not flowers. If somebody insults you, you remember it for years; but the beautiful sunset that you saw today is already forgotten; and the sound of running water that you heard this morning is no more part of your memory. And the distant call of a cuckoo... it is as if you never heard it. You bypass all that is beautiful. A rose calls you and you don't listen. A star waits for you to see it and you don't see; instead you go on collecting thorns, wounds, insults. People are such great collectors of pain.

We have to change this whole gestalt. Collect all that is beautiful and you will become what you collect. You will become what you contemplate. If you contemplate misery.... People go on contemplating misery; they go on looking at their wounds again and again, they don't allow them to heal. Of course they remain wounds. And when you are too obsessed with wounds, you attract wounds; you become a magnetic force for wounds.

This is one of the key points to remember: you attract things -- things don't just happen to you, you create the right context for them to happen. If a gambler comes to this town he will soon find other gamblers and other gamblers will find him. If a drunkard comes to this town he will soon find his company. There is an inner law: we attract that which we are. If we are miserable we attract more misery.

Be blissful. Invest in bliss, don't invest in misery. And collect small things... a bird on the wing, and for a moment the silence and the joy; for the moment you become the bird, the observer becomes the observed -- that is meditation. The humming of bees around a rosebush and suddenly you are transported into another world: the world of roses and bees. You are no more part of the ugly world that humanity has created. Cherish these moments. The silent lake in the night and the stars reflected in it -- keep it in your heart.

This way, slowly slowly, you will create a magnet within you which attracts more and more bliss. And once you have learned the secret of attracting bliss you are pulling God towards you, because bliss is nothing but the beginning of God entering you. It is his first contact with you. To be blissful means you are moved by the presence of God. You may not yet be aware of God; you may be simply moved by the sunset or the bird on the wing... or the fresh dewdrops in the early morning sun. You may think that you are moved by these things -- that is not so: these are just visible signs of something invisible, visible signatures of something invisible. Slowly slowly you will become aware that it is not just a dewdrop, God is looking at you. It is not just a rose flower, it is God flowering. And once you start becoming aware of God's presence surrounding you life is transformed.

That day one really becomes a sannyasin. This is just the beginning... a formal beginning, a gesture on your part that you are ready to commit yourself to this great pilgrimage. But real sannyas happens the day you become a magnet which attracts bliss, and ultimately God himself, towards you!

OSHO (to Dhyano) : There are only two ways to reach God: one is love, and the other is meditation. Love means dissolving yourself into existence so totally that no ego is left behind. Meditation means detaching yourself from the world so totally that you cannot nourish your ego any more. The ego needs the world. The I cannot exist without the thou: the I can exist only in context with others.

If there is nobody else your ego disappears. So really both ways are ways to let the ego disappear. In love you merge yourself with the whole; in meditation you become a witness of the whole, so total a witness, so detached, so distant, so cool, that the world disappears from your vision. When the world disappears from your vision and you are in total aloneness that means you are but you are no more an ego-entity.

In love also you are -- more so than ever before -- but not as an ego-entity. You cannot say "I am"; at the most you can say "am". It is a kind a amness, ISness, pure isness. And that is how it happens in meditation. Both ways are different in the beginning but as you come closer to the peak they come closer. When you have reached the peak they are one and the same. If one follows the path of love ultimately one comes to know that the people who were following the path of meditation have reached the same place, the same space, and vice versa.

If you follow love one day you attain meditation automatically, or if you follow meditation you attain to love automatically, because a man whose ego has disappeared can't be anything but love.

It is the ego that destroys love, that hinders love. When the ego is not there, there is nobody to hinder, there is no obstruction; your energy starts flowing.

Your name contains both ways to God; you can choose either love or meditation. There are only two kinds of religion in the world: a few religions follow the path of love, a few religions follow the path of meditation. Jesus, Krishna, Chaitanya -- these people follow the path of love. Buddha, Mahavira, Lao Tzu -- these people follow the path of meditation. My effort here is to create the great synthesis, to create a religious consciousness which accepts both as valid.