Chapter #19 Even Bein Gawd Ain T A Bed Of Roses #19

OSHO (to Diane) : Only the blissful one knows that God is -- and that knowing is enough to transform you totally, to give you a new lifestyle, to give you a new birth, a new being.

The only change, the only conversion needed is from misery to bliss; and it is our choice, hence it is not difficult. It is we who have chosen to be miserable. The very idea has to be said even if it hurts. Lies are very consoling; truth is never a consolation.

Truth brings transformation, not consolation, and each transformation is a process of great suffering because one has to change everything that one was before. One has to put everything into a new pattern. One has to start learning and living with a new vision. It is arduous. The mind resists change, the mind wants to go on repeating the old pattern. The mind moves in a vicious circle and it never wants to get out if it; hence everybody is caught in the misery. Once you start choosing misery you are caught: the mind goes on repeating the same thing again and again.

The dewdrop slipping from the lotus leaf is afraid; it is scared, it is hesitant. It knows that once it drops into the ocean it is lost; it will not have its own identity. It clings to the leaf.

Kahlil Gibran says: Every river, before it meets the ocean, hesitates, looks back. All those beautiful mountains and the plains and the people and the trees and the birds, the whole life of the river... and now suddenly a moment has come when it is going to disappear. It can't do anything, it has to disappear. But man can do something -- that is the trouble. Man can turn back, man can run away. Many times in our lives we come very close to the ocean but because of our old patterns we start running away. We cannot gather enough courage to lose our identity, and without losing it one cannot feel bliss -- and bliss is the door to the divine.

Being a sannyasin means taking a jump into the ocean -- not looking back, not even giving a second thought. As the ocean comes close, dance, rejoice and melt into it.

OSHO (to Riet) : Ego is also powerful but its power is ugly, it is the power of Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin. The power of egolessness is beautiful; it is the power of Buddha, Jesus, Zarathustra, Lao Tzu. The power that comes through ego is momentary. The power that comes through egolessness is eternal because it is God's, it is not yours; you are just a vehicle. And the same is true about richness.

Bliss brings an inner richness. It has nothing to do with money, nothing to do with possessions, because one can possess the whole world and yet remain a beggar. The vice versa is also true: one may be a beggar and yet be infinitely rich.

Jesus says: Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of God. One may not be rich in the eyes of the world, one may be absolutely poor but the whole kingdom of God belongs to such a person, one who has no ego. One who is ready to possess nothing is capable of possessing all, is worthy of possessing all.

Bliss brings both power and richness, but of a different dimension. onThe name of that dimension is God.

OSHO (to Richard) : You have to be porous, vulnerable, open so that God can reach you from every nook and corner, so that he can penetrate every cell of your being and every fiber of your body, mind, soul. But for centuries we have worshipped the hard person for a certain reason: we needed soldiers because society has been created around the idea of war. The whole past of humanity is subhuman. In fact humanity has not yet happened or it has happened only once in a while in individuals -- a Buddha here and there.

Once George Bernard Shaw was asked by somebody "What's your opinion about civilization?" He said "It is a good idea -- somebody has to practice it." It has not happened yet; it is only an idea, nobody has practiced it. In fact we have been practicing just the opposite: we have been practicing, teaching UNcivilization.

If a man is a Mohammedan, a Christian, a Hindu, this is uncivilized. It means we have divided humanity and wherever there is division there is conflict and violence. If we have nations -- India and China and Brazil -- that means that we are yet uncivilized. Nations can exist only in an uncivilized world; a civilized world will not have any need of nations, will not need boundaries. Everybody will be a citizen of the world; there will be no need for visas and passports and the whole ugly business. Our nations are nothing but big prisons. When you cross the boundary of one nation then you know that you have been a prisoner.

There are religions, there are nations, there are ideolgies, and they all divide. The politician and the priest and the pedagogue, they all know the secret; the only way to rule people, to oppress people, is to divide them, to divide them in as many possible ways as you can manage. The more divisions are there, the more politics is there; the more divisions are there, the more politicians are there. The more divisions are there, the more employment priests have.

Humanity in the past has been very hard, rocklike. We practised it. We forced every child to become hard because life is a struggle. We have given every child a project of ambition. And anybody who is ambitious needs to be hard because he will have to fight and the fight is going to be tooth and nail. The fight is going to be hard; you have to prove your steel. You can't exist like a flower, you can only exist as cold steel. Hence in the past we have respected the hard person, the stubborn person; wehave respected these people.

Stalin's real name was not Stalin;"stalin"was given to him because he was a man of steel. We have respected these men of steel very much; they have been our heroes in the past. Because of these people and because of this idea of struggle, hardness, man has become closed to god, to beauty, to love, to grace.

Go beyond all hardness. Become soft, become more feminine. Learn to hug and kiss. Learn to melt into people. Don't be steel, be a flower -- that is message.

My orange people are flower - people. In India orange is the colour of spring .It is the colour of flowers, of spring, of youth, of love, of joy.

(To Veetgyan) Only the insignificant can be caught in the net of knowledge, the significant escapes. To catch hold of the significant one has to learn a totally different strategy.

Ordinarily we are aggressive -- that is the way to conquer the insignificant. To get hold of the significant one has to learn wu-wei: action without action, effort without effort, because the significant only happens when you are in a state of let - go.

Divine bliss he called her -- the cosmetologist from Canada -- and said that the pursuit of anything less is futile because all else is afleeting and futile phenomenon.

(To Divya)There are only two types of people in the world: the happiness seekers and the bliss seekers. The happiness seekers are the worldly people; the bliss seekers are the other- worldly people the truly religious people. Their search is for the eternal. They are not satisfied with the momentatry, they are intelligent enough not to be deceived by the momentatry. They are aware and alert :they will not stop at anything less than the eternal. And if you don't settle for anything else ,sooner or later you are bound to find the eternal. It is within everybody's grasp but we remain occupied with happiness and we go on missing the oppurtinity of getting to the real, to the eternal.

The defnition of the real is: that which is eternal; and the definition of the unreal is: that which is momentatry. The unreal exists in time and the real exists beyond time.

Being a sannyasin means becoming a seeker of the divine, of the eternal, of the timeless, of the deathless.

( To Satyo):The East has risen to the highest peak of religious conciousness. The Christian feels hesitant about saying "I am god";he even feels hesitant about saying "I am Christ ".These things look like blasphemy. So is the case with Judaism and with Islam -- these three religions are not born in India. But all other religions that were born in India say that unless the separation between I and Thou disappears totally you are still living in illusions. Separation is illusory, non-separation is truth. The Upanishads say:"Aham Brahamasi",Iam god .Jesus says it again and again but Christians have completely forgotten. He says: I and my father are one. But they think it is right for Jesus to say that because he is the only begotten son of god, it is a blasphemy for anybody else to say it. Everybody is a son of god and everybody has the birthright not only to say it but to be it.

My function here is to help you to know that you are god, that you are truth. But to know it becomes possible only when you come across a source of bliss within yourself. At the innermost core of your bliss you will find a flame -- timeless, deathless, a flame of pure conciousness. That is god, that is truth, the ultimate truth. Knowing it, one is liberated: liberated from all chains, from all slaveries. Knowing it, one has known allthat is worth knowing.

(To Rajesh):Love becomes a mirror inwhich you can see your original face; and the orginal face is not that of a beggar: it is the face of the king of kings. Seeing it, one is freed from all desiring. Seeing it, one starts enjoying rather than desiring. Seeing it, one knows that "The whole belongs to me; there is no need to possess anything because all is already my own." One can enjoy the sun and the moon and the stars without possessing them. In fact the moment one becomes interested in possessiveness one loses all possibility of enjoying them.

The greatest seers of the world have enjoyed the world most for the simple reason that they were not possessive. They knew that "It is already ours, so what is the point of claiming?"They knew that "Each moment god goes on showering millions of gifts on us, without our asking."

Jesus says: Ask and the doors shall be opened unto you.... But he says "ask".A great Sufi mystic woman, Rabiya, says: Don't ask, look! -- the doors are already open. And Rabiya is saying a far higher truth. Not that Jesus is not aware of it ... but it depends on the audience. Jesus must be talking to very ordinary people; Rabiya is talking to a great seer, Hasan. She said this in a particular reference.

Hasan was praying before a mosque and crying and weeping and saying to god: Open the door!Rabiya was passing by. She came upto him, laughed, shook Hasan and said: What nonsense!The doors are open!It is because of your asking that you can't see. You are so full of desire that you can't see. You are so full of desire, you are so full of your own prayer, that you can't see: the doors are already open, they are never shut!

Because Hasan was a great adept, already on the way ,very evolved, Rabiya could say it. Jesus was talking to very ordinary people, unconscious people, hence he says: Ask and the doors shall be opened unto you. Seek and ye shall find. Again the same thing is there. Jesus is not so fortunate, he could not get the cream. He has to talk to the common crowds and the common crowds did what they could: they crucified him. Lao Tzu was not crucified, Rabiya was not crucified, and they were saying more revolutionary and rebellious things: Do not seek, and find.
Seeking is a sure way of missing, says Lao Tzu, because in seeking you have already assumed that it is not yours. In seeking you have already accepted that you have lost it. In seeking you already have declared that it is far away. It is within you, it is your very nature. Look within and you will find it in its whole glory.

This is possible through two things: either love or meditation. To you I suggest love. Let love be your mirror. For a few people meditation becomes the mirror -- it depends on the types. For you, definitely it is going to be love. So love more. Become so loving that it becomes your twenty-four-hour-a-day climate and you will find your original face. The original face is always of the king of kings -- that is another name for god.

(To Sarit):Love is not something static, it is dynamic. It is not a thing, it is a process, it is a movement. Because we go on trying to behave as if it is something static we destroy it. We want to cling to it, want it not to change, to remain the same forever and forever. When somebody says to you "I will love you forever and forever,"you feel great joy; but what he is saying is utter nonsense because he cannot even promise for tomorrow. What to say about tomorrow? -- even the next moment one never knows: the ways may part.

Love is a dynamic force .It is a constant movement and it is always moving into a new territory. If one understands this, love never creates misery. It always gives you more and more joy and more and more understanding; it becomes amirror in which you reflected in your total nudity. And there is no better mirror than love to see yourself, who you are. And not only are you reflected in it but the whole universe is reflected in it; it becomes a great understanding about existence itself. But one requirement has to be fulfilled: one has to be alert that it is amovement, a process. It is a riverand because it is a river it is beautiful, clean and pure. The moment it becomes a pool it becomes muddy; soon it will start stinking.

That has been one of the greatest calamities in humanity's life: we have thought of love as something static so that we cling to it, we can hold it in fists. It can't be held in your fist; it is mercurial. Enjoy it while it is there and when it is gone, feel grateful -- whatsoever it has given to you is precious. But don't cry, don't repent; it is absolutely unnecessary. It is crying over spilt milk -- nothing can be done about it. Move ahead. A real lover knows this secret; hence his love is always flowing, relaxed, blissful.

(To Dhyan Sadhan): Learn how to be joyous alone -- not that you have to avoid relationships but relationships are going to be secondary. The primary thing for you is to sit silently more and more, doing nothing just sitting silently, watching your breath. As the breath comes in, you watch; as the breath goes out, you watch. Simply be a watcher: the breath goes on coming in and out. Many times you will forget, the moment you remember that you have forgotten, come back, again start watching. This simple method is going to transform your whole life. This is how Gautam the Buddha became enlightened, through this method.

More people have become enlightened through this method than by any other method in the whole of history because it is simple, natural. It needs no arrangement, no special situation; you can do it anywhere. Walking you can do it, working you can do it, sitting in a train or in a plane you can do it, and nobody will become aware that you are doing something special -- it is so inner and so natural. Just stick to it and something great is going to happen to you through it.