Chapter #24 Even Bein Gawd Ain T A Bed Of Roses #24

(TO DEVAPRIYO): We are not abandoned by God. He has not deserted us. We may have deserted him, but he still looks after us, he is still care-full, he still cares. His love is infinite. Irrespective of us and our ideas he goes on showering his love, his compassion.

Friedrich Nietzsche says: God is dead- and he represents the mind of this century. Yes, for millions of people this has become their philosophy of life -- that there is no God. We may not believe in God; that makes no difference to God, he still goes on nourishing us. And by God I don't mean a person. I have to use the old word, "God," and I have to use the pronoun "he," but in fact I don't see that there is any person. Yes, there is a presence, but no person. There is no God sitting on a golden throne somewhere in heaven, controlling things, but the world is full of godliness.

H.G.Wells has said about Gautam Buddha -- a very pregnant statement -- that he was the most godless man, yet the most godly. He never believed in God as a person, but he believed that the whole existence was divine. There is nothing that is mundane; everything is sacred, absolutely sacred. There is nothing lower, nothing higher; there is no hierarchy.

And existence cares. When I say God cares I mean that existence cares for you, it is not indifferent. Let this be the foundation of your sannyas and then the temple can be raised very easily. It is easy to raise the temple once the foundation is rightly put. This is the foundation stone: remember that existence loves you, cares about you, is concerned about you; that you are not alienated, that you are not a stranger, that you are part of this great symphony, this orchestra, this celebration that goes on and on and knows no ending.

(TO KENNETH): All beauty is divine. Wherever beauty is God is. To worship beauty should be the only prayer. God is more available to the poetic mind, to the person who has aesthetic sensitivity, because he can feel beauty.

To the philosopher God is very far away. He thinks in terms of logic and logic is dry. Logic is like a desert: no greenery, no flowers, no birds singing; it is empty, hollow. Hence philosophers are continously missing the point. Poets are far more fortunate.

I would like my sannyasins to be more and more poetic and less and less philosophic. God is not a question of speculation but of experience. And when you experience God you experience the whole universe as a beautiful phenomenon, as exstasy, as celebration.

JOCHEN BECOMES KAVYO ..: Composing or not composing poetry is beside the point -- but living poetry. Buddha lives poetry, Jesus lives poetry, Zarathustra lives poetry. It is their very life: it is not something that they do, it is something that they are.

If one wants to be a poet one has to learn a few fundamental things. The most fundamental is that one has to drop thinking and move more and more towards feeling. One has to be less intellectual and more aesthetic, less of the head and more of the heart. Ultimately a sannyasins has to be totally headless.

There is an ancient meditation technique: Look into a mirror and go on trying to imagine you don't have a head. It takes three months to nine months and one day the miracle happens: you are standing before the mirror and the mirror does not reflect your head. Not that the mirror has changed but your idea of yourself has changed so much that you can't see the head any more. In ancient days this was one of the techniques used because after it one becomes absolutely ecstatic.

It is the head where all the disturbances happen. The head is hell and the heart is heaven. The distance is not much, just a few inches; one can jump it in a single leap. And the time has come!

To be a sannyasin means to be ready to take this jump. Move from logic to illogic, from rationality to irrationality. It is a kind of superior madness, but that has been always the way of the mystic; he is madly in love with God but his madness is a superior kind of sanity Our so-called sane people are not really sane, just normally insane.

You have been searching for long -- now the time has come to be totally committed and involved. A little search is not going to help; it needs your totality.

How long will you be here?

KAVYO: A year or six months.

OSHO: Good. do as many groups as possible... and lose your head! (LAUGHTER). My people are very very skillful at cutting off heads. Soon you will be running around without a head.

TO GISELA: To be a sannyasin means that from this moment your focus will be inwards, your central search will now be bliss. Yes, other things are needed: one needs a house, one needs food and one needs money and one needs clothes; one should pay attention to all these things but they should not become all and everything. Some space, some time should be given to the inner exploration. That's what I call meditation: it is sitting with yourself, being with yourself, available to your own subjectivity.

That availability, that openess, opens you not to your own self but to the very self of existence. And unless one knows what this life is all about one lives in vain. Unless one tastes the mystery of this immense beauty and ecstasy that surrounds one -- it is alreay there, you just need to be alittle more alert and sensitive to it -- life remains empty. One is born and yet not born, one lives and yet one is dead.

Seeing oneself one is born anew. Meeting with oneself is a rebirth, the real birth. One becomes twice born.

Jesus says: Unless your are born again you shall not enter into my kingdom of God.

VEET SANDEHA MEANS GOING BEYOND DOUBT...

It is trust, it is love, it is surrender: it is a courageous leap into the unknown, a quantum leap.

One who thinks too much cannot become a sannyasin; his thinking will be a barrier because thinking is basically rooted in doubt. Without doubt there is no thinking: doubt triggers thinking, thinking is impossible without doubt. Sannyas is an effort to cleanse your mind of all thougts, to empty your mind of all conditionings, to decondition you, to dehypnotize you.

Society hypnotizes everybody, conditions everybody. One person is a Christian, another is a Hindu-these are nothing but social strategies to keep people slaves. A sannyasin goes beyond all boundaries: of being a Hindu or a Mohammedan or a Christian, of being blacik or white, of being Indian, British, French. Even the boundary of being a man or woman is finally transcended. One simply is. One simply feels a tremendous amness, isness.

Hence sannyas can be rooted only in trust. Just as doubt is very fundamental to thinking, trust is fundamental to no-thinking. Doubt creates mind, mentation; trust creates no- mind, non-mentation. An no-mind is the goal. To function from a state of no-mind is to function truly, is to respond truly, spontaneously, naturally. It brings great freedom and great joy and great benediction.

Go beyond all doubts, go beyond all thinking and thoughts and ideologies. Go beyond Catholicism and go beyond communism so that you can be on your own. I am not giving any ideology here, I am not converting you to an ideology. This is not a conversion: I am not imposing any beliefs on you. On the contrary my effort is to take all beliefs away from you, to leave you without belief, because wherever belief is doubt is; they are never separate.

The believers are all doubters and doubters are all believers. Somebody believes in God and somebody believes in no God -- but both are believers. Even the communists who think that they are non-believers are not non-believers, they are believers. They believe in no God, they believe in no religion; they have created a religion without God and they have created their own trinity -- Karl Marx, Engels and Lenin. They have created their own worship and their ritual. It is a religion without religion, it is a religion without God, without soul... a very hollow religion of course, but is is a religion. It has become the opium of the people now.

I take away all ideologies. My work is basically to destroy and shatter them so that you can be freed. One you start seeing things as they are without any barrier of doubt and belief, without any thinking, you have come home. Then you can have a communion with reality. You can call that reality God, nirvana, enlightenment, truth -- these are just names. Any name will do because reality has no name of its own. It is nameless, it is a nameless experience.

Deva means divine. Sierra means a chain of mountain peaks which suggests a saw. The word comes from the Latin for saw; the teeth of the saw. The peaks of the mountains suggest the teeth of the saw. It is a beautiful name.

Man is not what he appears to be on the surface. On the surface he appears to be so flat but inside he is a chain of mountains. When you reach one peak, another peak higher than that is waiting for you ahead, challenging you. You think that this is goint to be the last, but once you have arrived on the other peak, other peaks are wainting for you still higher. There is no end to it. Man is an infinite journey, unending, with no beginning and no end -- a chain of peaks.

Of course each peak is followed by a valley so one who wants to live only on the peaks will be in difficulty. One has to accept the valleys too. There are sunny days and there are cloudy days, there are highs and there are lows. The moment you become capable of accepting both and are not disturbed by the valleys and the darkness and the sadness and the failure and death itself -- because that too is a valley -- you will rise again like a peak.

When one can accept failure and success equally one has really become a sannyasin. When one can even enjoy moments of sadness... because sadness has a certain silence, a certain beauty of its own. Just as darkness has its own beauty, its own deep deep relaxation, rest.

If you can see the peaks and the valleys as part of one another, as two aspects of the same coin, a great equilibrium arises in you. You become balanced; nothing can disturb you, neither unhappiness nor happiness. Nothing can become a distraction. You become centred and to be centred is all. You attain integrity. You become for the first time a soul, a self.

How long will you be here?

SIERRA: Five months.

OSHO: Good. Do as many groups as possible and see as many valleys and as many peaks as posssible!

INGRID-NOW MA PREM MANISHO

Jesus says: Truth liberates. But something has to be added to it; it is only half a statement. Truth certainly liberates but it has to be your own. If it is somebody else's rather than liberating, it creates a bondage.

My truth will be a bondage for you. I cannot give you my trith; I can only show you the way that I have traveled. You will have to travel the way and one day come upon the truth on your own.

Mind is always imitative. Mind is a monkey, literally a monkey. It is curious, very curious about everthing, but it has no perseverance, no patience. It goes on jumping from one branch to another branch. It never sticks to anything; it never digs any well really deep but goes on scratching the ground here and there. That is not the way to dig a well. One has to be totally involved, one has to put all one's energies to the work. Mind cannot do that; only the heart is capable of doing it. It is the heart that gets involved and committed.

Mind is always a Judas, it can never become a Christ. Judas was the most knowledgeable disciple of Jesus. All the other apostles were illiterate; he was the most cultured. And it is natural, not accidental, that he betrayed Jesus. The heady people are always betrayers: they don't know the beauty, the grace, of love, of commitment. They are traitors -- the head is a traitor.

Be of the heart! Slip out of the head and move towards the heart. Think less, feel more, and finally, even feel less: Be more! These are the three stages: thinking, feeling, being.

We are at the point of thinking but we have to be at the point of being. Then there is wisdom, wisdom that liberates: liberates one from the body, liberates one from the world, liberates one from all limitations, liberates one from personality and makes one capable of merging with the universal. Just as a river disappears into the ocean, the man of the heart disappears into God.

ANAND VEETRAGO: TO GO BEYOND ATTACHMENT IS THE ONLY WAY TO KNOW BLISS.

Attachment is the root cause of all misery -- and our mind is such that it starts clinging to each and everything. It starts becoming identified, attached, it does not know how to keep a distance; hence the misery.

Kahlil Gibran says that if the lovers are to be really blissful they should be like pillars in a temple: they support the same roof but they are not too close to each other; there is a distance. They are supporting the same roof but the pillars are separate from each other. So lovers should be: supporting the same love. But a distance is needed between lovers, a certain space of his own is needed for every being. Lovers encroach upon each other's space and the moment they start encroaching, trespassing -- they think they are permitted, they think that is their birthright -- love starts becoming ugly. A love that could have become a door to the divine becomes a door to hell.

Jean-Paul Sartre says: The other is hell. It is true and not true -- true if you look at the experience of people. The other is hell everywhere; it is because of the other that you are in misery. But still it is not a very deep and profound statement. The other is not hell. You make the other hell because you become attached to the other. You come too close, you start overlapping his being. You start clinging, you don't allow him freedom to grow and move. You become an imprisonment; hence the other becomes a hell. Otherwise, the other in itself is not hell. It is your attachment that creates hell. not the other.

Love deeply but remain unattached. Love your own body too, but remain unattached. Love all that is available -- people, birds, animals, trees, rocks -- but always keep a distance, a kind of aloofness. Remain cool, and remember to be cool does not mean to be cold. To be cold is dead; to be cool is the quality of a Christ, of a Buddha. They are not cold, they are not hot either. They are simply cool, like a cool breeze: very refreshing, rejuvenating, neither hot nor cold.

This has to be your work: don't be hot, don't be cold -- be cool!

Remain cool, unperturbed, undisturbed, and the technique to do it is non-attachment. Don't be attached to anything -- that is your meditation. That is the whole program for your life. It can transform you from an unconscious being into a conscious being.