Neither does the sun illumine That, nor the moon, nor fire.
Having gone there, none return; that is My supreme abode. 6.
An eternal portion of Myself, become the living soul in the world of life,
it draws the senses—six, with mind as the sixth—abiding in Nature. 7.
When the master obtains a body, and when he departs,
he goes bearing these, as the wind carries fragrances from their seat. 8.
Having taken his stand in ear, eye, touch, tongue, and indeed nose,
and in the mind, this one savors the objects of sense. 9.
Geeta Darshan #3
Available in:
Read in Original Hindi (मूल हिन्दी)
Sutra (Original)
न तद्भासयते सूर्यो न शशाङ्को न पावकः।
यद्गत्वा न निवर्तन्ते तद्धाम परमं मम।। 6।।
ममैवांशो जीवलोके जीवभूतः सनातनः।
मनःषष्ठानीन्द्रियाणि प्रकृतिस्थानि कर्षति।। 7।।
शरीरं यदवाप्नोति यच्चाप्युत्क्रामतीश्वरः।
गृहीत्वैतानि संयाति वायुर्गन्धानिवाशयात्।। 8।।
श्रोत्रं च्रुः स्पर्शनं च रसनं घ्राणमेव च।
अधिष्ठाय मनश्चायं विषयानुपसेवते।। 9।।
यद्गत्वा न निवर्तन्ते तद्धाम परमं मम।। 6।।
ममैवांशो जीवलोके जीवभूतः सनातनः।
मनःषष्ठानीन्द्रियाणि प्रकृतिस्थानि कर्षति।। 7।।
शरीरं यदवाप्नोति यच्चाप्युत्क्रामतीश्वरः।
गृहीत्वैतानि संयाति वायुर्गन्धानिवाशयात्।। 8।।
श्रोत्रं च्रुः स्पर्शनं च रसनं घ्राणमेव च।
अधिष्ठाय मनश्चायं विषयानुपसेवते।। 9।।
Transliteration:
na tadbhāsayate sūryo na śaśāṅko na pāvakaḥ|
yadgatvā na nivartante taddhāma paramaṃ mama|| 6||
mamaivāṃśo jīvaloke jīvabhūtaḥ sanātanaḥ|
manaḥṣaṣṭhānīndriyāṇi prakṛtisthāni karṣati|| 7||
śarīraṃ yadavāpnoti yaccāpyutkrāmatīśvaraḥ|
gṛhītvaitāni saṃyāti vāyurgandhānivāśayāt|| 8||
śrotraṃ cruḥ sparśanaṃ ca rasanaṃ ghrāṇameva ca|
adhiṣṭhāya manaścāyaṃ viṣayānupasevate|| 9||
na tadbhāsayate sūryo na śaśāṅko na pāvakaḥ|
yadgatvā na nivartante taddhāma paramaṃ mama|| 6||
mamaivāṃśo jīvaloke jīvabhūtaḥ sanātanaḥ|
manaḥṣaṣṭhānīndriyāṇi prakṛtisthāni karṣati|| 7||
śarīraṃ yadavāpnoti yaccāpyutkrāmatīśvaraḥ|
gṛhītvaitāni saṃyāti vāyurgandhānivāśayāt|| 8||
śrotraṃ cruḥ sparśanaṃ ca rasanaṃ ghrāṇameva ca|
adhiṣṭhāya manaścāyaṃ viṣayānupasevate|| 9||
Translation (Meaning)
Questions in this Discourse
First question:
Osho, how can the state of surrender be attained?
Osho, how can the state of surrender be attained?
In life, the most difficult, the most arduous inner state is surrender.
The mind is built around the ego. It is easy for the mind to assume, “I am the center of the whole universe,” as if the earth, the sun, the stars all revolve around me, for me; the whole of life is a means, and I am the end.
The ego-state means: I am the goal and everything else is a means. Everything exists for me; I exist for no one. I am the target; all that happens is for me. All is an arrangement to serve me. This is the ego-mood.
Surrender is exactly the opposite: I am nothing. My being is like a void, and the center lies outside me. Where you place that center is not of prime importance—one may place it in Buddha, another in Christ, another in Rama or Krishna; that is not crucial. The center of my being is not me; it is outside me—and I live for that. I am the means; That is the end.
This is supremely difficult, because ego feels completely natural. Yet without this revolution, no one ever attains truth—because the truth is that your center is not within you.
The whole existence has one center. Everyone’s center is the same. Therefore there is no way to have separate centers within each person. We live joined, not separate. To be a separate “person” is a delusion. All existence is interconnected, one whole. This cosmos is a single unit. There are no separate fragments here. Not even a single leaf is separate.
We have heard, “Without Rama’s will, not even a leaf stirs.” The meanings we have given to this are full of naïveté. “Without Rama’s will a leaf does not move” means simply that there are not two wills at work here—the leaf’s will and existence’s will are not two. Existence is one. When a leaf moves, it moves because the whole exists in movement.
A solitary leaf cannot move. If there is no wind, the leaf will not move. If there is no sun, there will be no wind. Everything is joined. And when a small leaf does move, it means the whole existence has arranged for that movement. In that very moment, the entirety has made room for it to happen. If there is the slightest shortfall in that total support, the leaf will not move.
This is all that “without Rama’s will a leaf does not move” means. It does not mean that some person called Rama sits above, issuing orders to each leaf, “Now you move; now you don’t.” Such a notion is foolish.
Existence is one. Even those stars billions of light years away have a hand in the leaf that trembles in your garden. Without them, the leaf could not move.
A wave rises in the ocean—the moon has a hand in it. Without the moon, that wave would not rise. The moon shines because the sun has a hand in it. The moon has no light of its own: it is borrowed, reflected from the sun. The moon stirs the ocean. And when the ocean moves, something within you also moves—because all life has arisen from the sea.
Seventy-five percent of you is ocean water. You are seventy-five percent sea. The taste of the water within you is exactly the taste of the sea—the same proportion of salt, the same salinity, the same chemical constituents. Not only the fish lives in the sea; you live in the sea. The difference is that for the fish the sea is outside; for you the sea is inside. If the salt within you drops too low, you will die; if it rises too high, you will be in trouble. It must be in the same proportion as the sea.
When a child is first conceived in the mother’s womb, the womb recreates the precise condition of the sea. The child’s first growth is in sea-like water. The child first grows like a fish.
When the ocean moves, something within you also moves. If you feel good sitting by the sea, have you ever wondered why? The sea’s vibration, its aliveness, sets your little inner sea vibrating, alive.
If you feel a serenity under the full moon, it is the moonbeams stirring your inner sea, quickening it.
On the full-moon night the world sees the most cases of madness; on the new-moon night the fewest. Even madness has its tides. On the full moon, crime peaks around the world; on the new moon it is the lowest. You might think the dark night of the new moon should see the most crime—but it does not, because people are less excited then. On the full moon, they are more aroused.
The old word in English is “moonstruck.” The word “lunatic” comes from “lunar,” the moon. The moon has a hand in madness.
And if the moon has a hand in madness, it will have a hand in wisdom too. If Buddha attained enlightenment on a full-moon night, the moon’s hand cannot be denied.
All is joined, all is one. We are not separate.
Surrender means to understand this fact: the center of my life is not within me, it is in existence. The devotee calls that center God; the knower calls it Brahman; the very rational call it Truth. These are differences of words. What you call it is not the question. To understand that the center lies beyond oneself is to become surrendered.
And when the center is not within me, what is there to be stiff about? If I am only a wave and not the ocean itself, what is there to be proud of? So much ego—for what? To take oneself so seriously is madness. One who truly understands himself will understand himself as a zero. One who misunderstands himself will think himself to be very much.
So the more you think you are something, the less is the possibility of being religious. The less you take yourself to be something, the greater the possibility of being religious. And the day you understand you are zero, that very day you are God Himself. The moment you are zero, surrender happens.
Therefore there are two approaches to surrender—and there are only two kinds of religions in the world because there are only two approaches.
One approach: become zero. When Buddha and Mahavira say, “Be without refuge,” they are asking you to become a zero. They say, become utterly silent, become empty. The moment you are empty, the center is no longer within.
The second path: don’t even bother thinking about yourself—place your head at the feet of Rama, or at the feet of Krishna. Krishna says to Arjuna, sarva-dharmān parityajya mām ekaṁ śaraṇaṁ vraja—abandon all, all dharmas; come to my refuge. You place your head at someone’s feet.
Either become empty—and the inner center is gone; or accept someone as the Full, and the center within is gone. In both states you vanish.
The Jains and Buddhists follow the first understanding. The result is the same: become empty, become silent, become still. Forget the ego; dissolve it. Hence they can speak of “no-refuge” (asharan). Why “no-refuge”?—understand this a little. Mahavira says: the ego is so subtle that it can survive even in surrender.
There is truth in this. Mahavira says: when you go to someone’s refuge, it is you who go. It is your decision. You think, you decide, “I surrender.” It remains the decision of your “I.” There is the danger that the “I” may hide, not die—because you remain the owner. When you like, you can take your surrender back.
Arjuna could say to Krishna, “Enough now. I take back the head I had placed at your feet.” What could Krishna do?
You choose a guru—that is your choice. If tomorrow you leave the guru, what can the guru do? If after surrendering you are still able to walk away, that surrender was false—a deception. You only forgot yourself for a while; you did not dissolve.
This danger is there. Therefore Mahavira says: this method is not useful. Do not go to another’s refuge; directly erase yourself. Not by someone else’s device—directly. It is a frontal assault.
Krishna, Rama, Mohammed, Christ, Zarathustra—all accept surrender: “Go into refuge.” Their point also has great strength. They say: if even in the presence of the other you do not dissolve, if you can deceive yourself even with the excuse of the other, then a person who can deceive himself in the presence of a witness will certainly deceive himself when alone. One who, with a witness there, still does not refrain from cheating—what will he do in solitude?
You play cards and you cheat others. But there are people who play patience—solitaire—alone, and they cheat themselves. If you have ever dealt both sides when playing alone, you will know you have cheated many times. Whom are you cheating? Yet even in playing solitaire people cheat.
The difficulty lies with man. Whatever the method, the difficulty remains. So Krishna, Zarathustra, and Christ hold that to leave such a person alone is dangerous—at least the eyes and presence of the other give a chance to be held and supported. There is truth in this.
Jain practice has produced very egoistic monks. In the Jain monk one rarely sees humility; one sees stiffness. There is a reason: he practices austerity, lives truthfully, observes celibacy, fasts, performs penances—there is a reason to be stiff. Not without reason. But whether with reason or without, stiffness is a disease. And because there is no avenue of surrender, the notion “I am doing it” becomes stronger.
Both paths have dangers. Both have benefits. One should see where one’s danger lies and avoid that.
If you are very deceptive, very dishonest, and are even capable of deceiving yourself—if self-deception is easy for you—then Mahavira’s path is dangerous for you. If you are incapable of deceiving yourself, Mahavira’s path is easy for you.
The seeker must decide how to go. But the aim is one: the seeker must dissolve. Either dissolve directly—become zero—or go and lose yourself at another’s feet and merge.
How will surrender arise?
By understanding your condition. By understanding your real situation—exactly what you are.
Chuang Tzu was passing through a graveyard at dawn. It was still dark; daybreak was far. His foot struck a skull. He took the skull with him and always kept it near. Many times his disciples said, “Throw this away; it looks ugly. Why keep it?”
Chuang Tzu would say, “I keep it for remembrance. Whenever my skull begins to heat up within—whenever I feel I am something—I look at it and remember: today or tomorrow you will be lying in the cremation ground; people will kick you as they pass; no one will even pause to ask forgiveness. When someone abuses me or raises a hand against me, I do not look at him; I look at this skull. My mind cools: ‘Rightly so. How long can I protect this skull? Soon it will lie for eternity, being kicked. What difference does it make if someone strikes today or someone strikes tomorrow, when I will not be there to protect it?’”
Even a skull can lead you into emptiness.
A continual remembrance of your real situation—that you are mortal; that this body is here only a short while; that you have limits; that your knowledge has a limit, your power has a limit; that you are not independent but dependent; hemmed in on all sides, mutually interdependent; that you are not an independent entity—let this perception deepen, let this thought sink, let it descend into meditation, come to abide in the heart: surrender will bear fruit.
It is difficult because the mind does not want to accept “I am nothing.” There is an attachment: “I am something.” A very poor attachment, a very weak one—worthless, not worth even a penny—but still, “I am something.”
I have heard: Mulla Nasruddin’s elder brother sent him to his in-laws to bring his wife back. As he left, the brother said, “Nasruddin, don’t indulge in idle chatter. You have a habit of talking nonsense—don’t use it. Just answer only in ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”
Nasruddin tied a knot in his handkerchief: he would speak no other words than yes and no. He arrived. His brother’s father-in-law asked, “You have come, Nasruddin? Your elder brother hasn’t come?” Nasruddin said, “No.” “Is he ill?” “Yes.” “Is there no hope that he will survive?” “Yes.”
The house went into an uproar. People beat their chests and began to wail. Then the father-in-law said, “If your brother is at his last breath, what will I send my daughter with you for? I refuse. She is already a widow.”
Nasruddin returned, weeping and sad. His brother asked, “What happened? Where is your sister-in-law?” Nasruddin said, “She became a widow.” The brother said, “Idiot! I am sitting here alive—how can she be a widow?” Nasruddin said, “What difference does your being alive make? When Aunt became a widow, you were alive. When Auntie became a widow, you were alive. Hundreds of women in the village became widows while you were alive. You could not stop any of them from becoming widows. What can you do now? Does anyone’s becoming a widow depend on you?”
Nasruddin is right. But inside, the “I” sits as the center all the time. Nasruddin’s satire is perfectly apt: what happens because of your being here? Yet each thinks that everything happens because of him. Even a lizard thinks that if it does not hold the wall, the house will collapse. We all think in the same way.
People come to me and say they want to meditate, to be silent. “But if we become silent, what will happen? There is the family, wife, children…”
Each person fancies that the world runs because of him—supported by him. But the graveyards are full of such people who all fancied the same. In the place where you are sitting, at least ten people have died and been buried before. There is not a patch of ground on earth where layers upon layers of corpses have not lain. All of them believed what you believe—that “I am something.”
If this delusion breaks, surrender begins to arise. And to break it, you need do nothing—just open your eyes. Open your eyes wide to what is around you.
The fact is: you are nothing. A small happenstance—like a ripple of water. It barely forms and it is gone. Not even a line etched in stone; a line drawn on water. One who begins to think and understand himself correctly, who places himself in the context of the world and tries to recognize his situation, will experience: I am a drop of water; the notion of being the ocean is false.
And as one reflects within, investigates, contemplates, it will become visible that the world is vast beyond me—before me, after me, around me—vastness. In that vastness I am a small quivering particle of life; I am not the center.
Then surrender becomes natural. And if no God appears, if there is no sense of a deity, then emptiness will be attained.
Both yield the same result. Either emptiness is attained, or the feeling of refuge arises. What is essential is that you disappear. The very moment you are lost, the truth of life is revealed.
The mind is built around the ego. It is easy for the mind to assume, “I am the center of the whole universe,” as if the earth, the sun, the stars all revolve around me, for me; the whole of life is a means, and I am the end.
The ego-state means: I am the goal and everything else is a means. Everything exists for me; I exist for no one. I am the target; all that happens is for me. All is an arrangement to serve me. This is the ego-mood.
Surrender is exactly the opposite: I am nothing. My being is like a void, and the center lies outside me. Where you place that center is not of prime importance—one may place it in Buddha, another in Christ, another in Rama or Krishna; that is not crucial. The center of my being is not me; it is outside me—and I live for that. I am the means; That is the end.
This is supremely difficult, because ego feels completely natural. Yet without this revolution, no one ever attains truth—because the truth is that your center is not within you.
The whole existence has one center. Everyone’s center is the same. Therefore there is no way to have separate centers within each person. We live joined, not separate. To be a separate “person” is a delusion. All existence is interconnected, one whole. This cosmos is a single unit. There are no separate fragments here. Not even a single leaf is separate.
We have heard, “Without Rama’s will, not even a leaf stirs.” The meanings we have given to this are full of naïveté. “Without Rama’s will a leaf does not move” means simply that there are not two wills at work here—the leaf’s will and existence’s will are not two. Existence is one. When a leaf moves, it moves because the whole exists in movement.
A solitary leaf cannot move. If there is no wind, the leaf will not move. If there is no sun, there will be no wind. Everything is joined. And when a small leaf does move, it means the whole existence has arranged for that movement. In that very moment, the entirety has made room for it to happen. If there is the slightest shortfall in that total support, the leaf will not move.
This is all that “without Rama’s will a leaf does not move” means. It does not mean that some person called Rama sits above, issuing orders to each leaf, “Now you move; now you don’t.” Such a notion is foolish.
Existence is one. Even those stars billions of light years away have a hand in the leaf that trembles in your garden. Without them, the leaf could not move.
A wave rises in the ocean—the moon has a hand in it. Without the moon, that wave would not rise. The moon shines because the sun has a hand in it. The moon has no light of its own: it is borrowed, reflected from the sun. The moon stirs the ocean. And when the ocean moves, something within you also moves—because all life has arisen from the sea.
Seventy-five percent of you is ocean water. You are seventy-five percent sea. The taste of the water within you is exactly the taste of the sea—the same proportion of salt, the same salinity, the same chemical constituents. Not only the fish lives in the sea; you live in the sea. The difference is that for the fish the sea is outside; for you the sea is inside. If the salt within you drops too low, you will die; if it rises too high, you will be in trouble. It must be in the same proportion as the sea.
When a child is first conceived in the mother’s womb, the womb recreates the precise condition of the sea. The child’s first growth is in sea-like water. The child first grows like a fish.
When the ocean moves, something within you also moves. If you feel good sitting by the sea, have you ever wondered why? The sea’s vibration, its aliveness, sets your little inner sea vibrating, alive.
If you feel a serenity under the full moon, it is the moonbeams stirring your inner sea, quickening it.
On the full-moon night the world sees the most cases of madness; on the new-moon night the fewest. Even madness has its tides. On the full moon, crime peaks around the world; on the new moon it is the lowest. You might think the dark night of the new moon should see the most crime—but it does not, because people are less excited then. On the full moon, they are more aroused.
The old word in English is “moonstruck.” The word “lunatic” comes from “lunar,” the moon. The moon has a hand in madness.
And if the moon has a hand in madness, it will have a hand in wisdom too. If Buddha attained enlightenment on a full-moon night, the moon’s hand cannot be denied.
All is joined, all is one. We are not separate.
Surrender means to understand this fact: the center of my life is not within me, it is in existence. The devotee calls that center God; the knower calls it Brahman; the very rational call it Truth. These are differences of words. What you call it is not the question. To understand that the center lies beyond oneself is to become surrendered.
And when the center is not within me, what is there to be stiff about? If I am only a wave and not the ocean itself, what is there to be proud of? So much ego—for what? To take oneself so seriously is madness. One who truly understands himself will understand himself as a zero. One who misunderstands himself will think himself to be very much.
So the more you think you are something, the less is the possibility of being religious. The less you take yourself to be something, the greater the possibility of being religious. And the day you understand you are zero, that very day you are God Himself. The moment you are zero, surrender happens.
Therefore there are two approaches to surrender—and there are only two kinds of religions in the world because there are only two approaches.
One approach: become zero. When Buddha and Mahavira say, “Be without refuge,” they are asking you to become a zero. They say, become utterly silent, become empty. The moment you are empty, the center is no longer within.
The second path: don’t even bother thinking about yourself—place your head at the feet of Rama, or at the feet of Krishna. Krishna says to Arjuna, sarva-dharmān parityajya mām ekaṁ śaraṇaṁ vraja—abandon all, all dharmas; come to my refuge. You place your head at someone’s feet.
Either become empty—and the inner center is gone; or accept someone as the Full, and the center within is gone. In both states you vanish.
The Jains and Buddhists follow the first understanding. The result is the same: become empty, become silent, become still. Forget the ego; dissolve it. Hence they can speak of “no-refuge” (asharan). Why “no-refuge”?—understand this a little. Mahavira says: the ego is so subtle that it can survive even in surrender.
There is truth in this. Mahavira says: when you go to someone’s refuge, it is you who go. It is your decision. You think, you decide, “I surrender.” It remains the decision of your “I.” There is the danger that the “I” may hide, not die—because you remain the owner. When you like, you can take your surrender back.
Arjuna could say to Krishna, “Enough now. I take back the head I had placed at your feet.” What could Krishna do?
You choose a guru—that is your choice. If tomorrow you leave the guru, what can the guru do? If after surrendering you are still able to walk away, that surrender was false—a deception. You only forgot yourself for a while; you did not dissolve.
This danger is there. Therefore Mahavira says: this method is not useful. Do not go to another’s refuge; directly erase yourself. Not by someone else’s device—directly. It is a frontal assault.
Krishna, Rama, Mohammed, Christ, Zarathustra—all accept surrender: “Go into refuge.” Their point also has great strength. They say: if even in the presence of the other you do not dissolve, if you can deceive yourself even with the excuse of the other, then a person who can deceive himself in the presence of a witness will certainly deceive himself when alone. One who, with a witness there, still does not refrain from cheating—what will he do in solitude?
You play cards and you cheat others. But there are people who play patience—solitaire—alone, and they cheat themselves. If you have ever dealt both sides when playing alone, you will know you have cheated many times. Whom are you cheating? Yet even in playing solitaire people cheat.
The difficulty lies with man. Whatever the method, the difficulty remains. So Krishna, Zarathustra, and Christ hold that to leave such a person alone is dangerous—at least the eyes and presence of the other give a chance to be held and supported. There is truth in this.
Jain practice has produced very egoistic monks. In the Jain monk one rarely sees humility; one sees stiffness. There is a reason: he practices austerity, lives truthfully, observes celibacy, fasts, performs penances—there is a reason to be stiff. Not without reason. But whether with reason or without, stiffness is a disease. And because there is no avenue of surrender, the notion “I am doing it” becomes stronger.
Both paths have dangers. Both have benefits. One should see where one’s danger lies and avoid that.
If you are very deceptive, very dishonest, and are even capable of deceiving yourself—if self-deception is easy for you—then Mahavira’s path is dangerous for you. If you are incapable of deceiving yourself, Mahavira’s path is easy for you.
The seeker must decide how to go. But the aim is one: the seeker must dissolve. Either dissolve directly—become zero—or go and lose yourself at another’s feet and merge.
How will surrender arise?
By understanding your condition. By understanding your real situation—exactly what you are.
Chuang Tzu was passing through a graveyard at dawn. It was still dark; daybreak was far. His foot struck a skull. He took the skull with him and always kept it near. Many times his disciples said, “Throw this away; it looks ugly. Why keep it?”
Chuang Tzu would say, “I keep it for remembrance. Whenever my skull begins to heat up within—whenever I feel I am something—I look at it and remember: today or tomorrow you will be lying in the cremation ground; people will kick you as they pass; no one will even pause to ask forgiveness. When someone abuses me or raises a hand against me, I do not look at him; I look at this skull. My mind cools: ‘Rightly so. How long can I protect this skull? Soon it will lie for eternity, being kicked. What difference does it make if someone strikes today or someone strikes tomorrow, when I will not be there to protect it?’”
Even a skull can lead you into emptiness.
A continual remembrance of your real situation—that you are mortal; that this body is here only a short while; that you have limits; that your knowledge has a limit, your power has a limit; that you are not independent but dependent; hemmed in on all sides, mutually interdependent; that you are not an independent entity—let this perception deepen, let this thought sink, let it descend into meditation, come to abide in the heart: surrender will bear fruit.
It is difficult because the mind does not want to accept “I am nothing.” There is an attachment: “I am something.” A very poor attachment, a very weak one—worthless, not worth even a penny—but still, “I am something.”
I have heard: Mulla Nasruddin’s elder brother sent him to his in-laws to bring his wife back. As he left, the brother said, “Nasruddin, don’t indulge in idle chatter. You have a habit of talking nonsense—don’t use it. Just answer only in ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”
Nasruddin tied a knot in his handkerchief: he would speak no other words than yes and no. He arrived. His brother’s father-in-law asked, “You have come, Nasruddin? Your elder brother hasn’t come?” Nasruddin said, “No.” “Is he ill?” “Yes.” “Is there no hope that he will survive?” “Yes.”
The house went into an uproar. People beat their chests and began to wail. Then the father-in-law said, “If your brother is at his last breath, what will I send my daughter with you for? I refuse. She is already a widow.”
Nasruddin returned, weeping and sad. His brother asked, “What happened? Where is your sister-in-law?” Nasruddin said, “She became a widow.” The brother said, “Idiot! I am sitting here alive—how can she be a widow?” Nasruddin said, “What difference does your being alive make? When Aunt became a widow, you were alive. When Auntie became a widow, you were alive. Hundreds of women in the village became widows while you were alive. You could not stop any of them from becoming widows. What can you do now? Does anyone’s becoming a widow depend on you?”
Nasruddin is right. But inside, the “I” sits as the center all the time. Nasruddin’s satire is perfectly apt: what happens because of your being here? Yet each thinks that everything happens because of him. Even a lizard thinks that if it does not hold the wall, the house will collapse. We all think in the same way.
People come to me and say they want to meditate, to be silent. “But if we become silent, what will happen? There is the family, wife, children…”
Each person fancies that the world runs because of him—supported by him. But the graveyards are full of such people who all fancied the same. In the place where you are sitting, at least ten people have died and been buried before. There is not a patch of ground on earth where layers upon layers of corpses have not lain. All of them believed what you believe—that “I am something.”
If this delusion breaks, surrender begins to arise. And to break it, you need do nothing—just open your eyes. Open your eyes wide to what is around you.
The fact is: you are nothing. A small happenstance—like a ripple of water. It barely forms and it is gone. Not even a line etched in stone; a line drawn on water. One who begins to think and understand himself correctly, who places himself in the context of the world and tries to recognize his situation, will experience: I am a drop of water; the notion of being the ocean is false.
And as one reflects within, investigates, contemplates, it will become visible that the world is vast beyond me—before me, after me, around me—vastness. In that vastness I am a small quivering particle of life; I am not the center.
Then surrender becomes natural. And if no God appears, if there is no sense of a deity, then emptiness will be attained.
Both yield the same result. Either emptiness is attained, or the feeling of refuge arises. What is essential is that you disappear. The very moment you are lost, the truth of life is revealed.
Second question: Osho, you have said that to return to our source the primal scream is necessary. But how will we recognize which cathartic process is the desired primal scream?
You won’t need to recognize it at all. After it, you will instantly be someone else. When you are ill, how do you recognize that you have become healthy? Do you have any method? No. When the illness goes, you immediately experience health. When a headache disappears, how do you figure out that now the head is fine and the pain is gone?
The moment the primal scream—the catharsis—happens, in that very moment you will feel light like a flower, as if the whole burden has dropped. In truth there is no real burden on you; there is only the notion of it. Yet you drag this weight because without a burden the ego cannot function.
Hence, the more egoistic a person is, the bigger a load he takes on. If you are ego-centered, you must become a president, a prime minister. The ego demands the burden of a whole nation, of the entire earth; only then does it feel, “I am somebody.” Although many politicians can do nothing—they do not lessen burdens, they seem to increase them—but by carrying a huge load they feel, “We are something.”
I have heard: before dying, Stalin gave Khrushchev two letters. He said, “When I die and you come to power, keep these carefully. Open letter number one when some plan of yours fails so badly that your throne begins to totter. Open the second when there is no hope at all of saving yourself, when everything is sinking and you have no option but to step down.”
When Khrushchev failed… And all politicians fail. Till now no politician has ever truly succeeded on earth; nor will they. Because politics has nothing to do with success. The problems are colossal, and only a man’s ego gives him the idea, “I will solve them.” The problems are vast; no one solves them. Yet for a while even this delusion gratifies the mind and gives deep satisfaction to the ego: “I am trying to solve them.” Even the thought that all solutions depend on me and that people’s hopes are pinned on me gives sufficient pleasure.
When Khrushchev’s plans failed, in desperation he opened the first letter. Stalin had written, “Put all the responsibility on my head.” This is an old trick of politicians: throw all blame on those who are not in power now—those who were in power earlier, or who are dead—“because of them…” Khrushchev did exactly that. For a few days the boat kept afloat. Then again the days of sinking returned. He opened the second letter. Stalin had written, “Now you too write two letters.”
Man’s biggest problem is this: without problems your ego cannot be constructed. People say, “How can we be peaceful!” But they do not want peace. Because if you become peaceful, how will the ego stand? You need big problems, challenges, conflict—against them the ego stands erect.
To enlarge the ego people create problems. You do it too. And if for two or four days there is no problem, a great restlessness begins. You feel empty. Nothing comes to mind to do. Being or not being on the earth seems the same. If you are alive, some disturbance is needed. The greater the disturbance, the more alive you feel.
Psychologists say criminals and politicians belong to the same category. A criminal cannot live without committing crime, because by creating disturbance he becomes significant amid the turmoil. And a politician too cannot live without creating disturbance, because without disturbance he has no value, no meaning. That is why great leaders arise in times of war, because it is hard to find a bigger disturbance than war. Therefore, one who wants to be a great leader has to bring about war.
You are doing the same. You raise, seek, create disturbances; if they are not there, you imagine them. All these upheavals leave their shadows, their stains, their wounds inside you; they leave their sorrow. Within you, a ruin gets constructed.
Primal scream—the original cry—is the collective catharsis of all these wounds. Whatever you have piled up—junk, miseries, pains, lies, untruths, deceptions—the ruin you have built within, let it all pour out in a single scream. After it you become utterly light. All the anguish of the mind disappears. It is not even enough to say that; the mind itself disappears.
You won’t need to identify it; suddenly you will find you have grown wings—you can fly. Suddenly you will find gravitation has ceased; the earth no more pulls, the weight is gone; you are weightless. There is no worry ahead or behind. This moment is sufficient. And this moment is deeply delightful. The taste of bliss will tell you that the catharsis has happened. Suffering tells you that catharsis is still pending.
And you don’t even allow the catharsis. You cannot even weep wholeheartedly, cannot scream wholeheartedly. There is no way you do anything wholeheartedly. Everything is half-and-half, false and pretended. Then if the whole life becomes a sad boredom, there is no cause for surprise.
Therefore a seeker needs courage—to throw out what is suppressed within. And if even once you gather the courage, it is not very difficult to throw it out. And once the taste begins—as soon as the load drops and the flavor arises…
I have heard: One day Mulla Nasruddin was walking along, hurling very crude, filthy abuses at his shoes. A friend asked, “What’s the matter?” He looked so depressed, so unhappy, his face as if pricked by thorns. He said, “The shoes are tight, and my feet are in great pain.” The friend said, “Then why don’t you take them off?” Nasruddin said, “That I cannot do.” The friend couldn’t understand. He asked, “Why not?” Nasruddin said, “This is my only support for happiness. When, after a whole day—tired, defeated, frustrated—I return home from shop and business; the wife pounces the moment she sees me—she starts nagging and shouting. The children present their demands. There is no money at hand. After all the pain and misery of the whole day, when I go home and take off my shoes, the bliss of liberation descends. Just by taking off the shoes I feel there is joy in life. There is no other support for happiness—only these shoes are my support.”
You too cling to your suffering, because that suffering is your small glimpse of happiness. When you take it off for a while, you feel a little good. Nasruddin says, “I cannot take off these shoes, because apart from them there is no happiness in life.”
Have you ever noticed what all you call happiness? People call sex happiness; it is nothing more than taking off your shoes. Tensions accumulate. All day you collect tensions. With the outward movement of energy, those tensions slacken; it seems happiness has been found.
Mahavira or Buddha do not attain bliss by conquering sex. Rather, because bliss is attained, sex becomes futile. They do not experience happiness by taking off the shoe; because happiness is already present, there is no need to bear the shoe’s pain and build an expectation of relief.
Loaded with the tensions of the day you go and sit in a movie; you feel pleasure. What kind of pleasure can that be! The eyes get even more tired. But at least for two or three hours you forget yourself; you get absorbed in the story. The more you are occupied, the more self-forgetfulness there is.
But for one who has been in self-forgetfulness the whole day—for one who has no ego, with nothing to forget—does he need to sit in a cinema for three hours to be made to forget? He has taken off the shoes altogether.
With alcohol you get pleasure for a little while. The same ego disappears by drinking. That is why drinkers are humble. Those who have given up drinking are stiff, of harsh nature; they lack even this small device to lay aside the ego.
Therefore you will often find the drinker gentle, friendly, kind; he can be of use when needed. You can rely on him. He won’t be stingy or hard. Because with a little alcohol at least the ego is forgotten—not destroyed, but forgotten for a while.
That is why, when you drink, in a short while the sadness on the face disappears and a cheerfulness appears. The feet get a swing and a dance. This is the same man who, a little earlier, was walking as if dead; his face was such that there seemed no meaning in life. Now his eyes have a sparkle, his face a glow, his feet a rhythm. How did he become so light? Alcohol does not make anyone light; it only lulls the ego to sleep.
That is why the Sufi fakirs say: those who have drunk the wine of God find no meaning in this wine. The wine of God means simply this: those who have dropped the ego itself, who have taken refuge in Him—now there remains nothing to forget. So the ecstasy of the fakirs is like that of drunkards, but of a very profound wine. And the ecstasy of the drunkard is very costly: he gets almost nothing and suffers much. The ecstasy of the fakir is of gaining so much without losing anything.
We cling to suffering and we accumulate it. We even relish it. Watch people when they narrate their tales of woe—how pleased they look! It is strange. If no one listens to your woes, you feel hurt; if someone listens, you enjoy it. And everyone exaggerates his story of suffering.
One of my friends said to me—his wife used to come to me—he said, “Don’t get too involved in what she says. She gets a pimple and reports cancer.” And I found he was right. A pimple—what kind of illness is that! Unless it is cancer, the ego does not get its relish.
You may not have noticed: when you go to a doctor thinking you have caught a great disease, and the doctor says, “There is nothing at all,” you don’t feel good. Inside there is a little hurt; you suspect perhaps this doctor is no good. “For a person like me—nothing, or some trifling thing!” It seems upside down, but inside you it feels as if the coming and going has been useless.
So the dishonest—or shall I say the clever—doctors will look at you and make a very grave face. That soothes your mind. When they take your hand in theirs, it seems to you the situation is very serious. Even if you have nothing, they will inflate something into a disease. The patient is pleased by this. Tell a patient, “It is a mental fancy; there is no illness,” and he becomes your enemy.
No one is ready to accept that we even cling to suffering—but we do. We even magnify it. Then that suffering becomes big and sits upon our head like a stone, upon our chest like a rock. Then we haul it around.
Catharsis means: put the suffering down. Primal scream means: let the suffering be expressed, be released. Let it pour out in a tremendous cry so that the chest becomes light, the heart’s weight drops.
So you will not have to find out, “How shall I know that this was the primal scream?” You will know like this: afterwards you will be immediately light. You will find as if you never had any suffering at all—as if you were always in bliss. As if you had seen a dream of sorrow and the sleep has broken; now there is no dream—and you are laughing.
The moment the primal scream—the catharsis—happens, in that very moment you will feel light like a flower, as if the whole burden has dropped. In truth there is no real burden on you; there is only the notion of it. Yet you drag this weight because without a burden the ego cannot function.
Hence, the more egoistic a person is, the bigger a load he takes on. If you are ego-centered, you must become a president, a prime minister. The ego demands the burden of a whole nation, of the entire earth; only then does it feel, “I am somebody.” Although many politicians can do nothing—they do not lessen burdens, they seem to increase them—but by carrying a huge load they feel, “We are something.”
I have heard: before dying, Stalin gave Khrushchev two letters. He said, “When I die and you come to power, keep these carefully. Open letter number one when some plan of yours fails so badly that your throne begins to totter. Open the second when there is no hope at all of saving yourself, when everything is sinking and you have no option but to step down.”
When Khrushchev failed… And all politicians fail. Till now no politician has ever truly succeeded on earth; nor will they. Because politics has nothing to do with success. The problems are colossal, and only a man’s ego gives him the idea, “I will solve them.” The problems are vast; no one solves them. Yet for a while even this delusion gratifies the mind and gives deep satisfaction to the ego: “I am trying to solve them.” Even the thought that all solutions depend on me and that people’s hopes are pinned on me gives sufficient pleasure.
When Khrushchev’s plans failed, in desperation he opened the first letter. Stalin had written, “Put all the responsibility on my head.” This is an old trick of politicians: throw all blame on those who are not in power now—those who were in power earlier, or who are dead—“because of them…” Khrushchev did exactly that. For a few days the boat kept afloat. Then again the days of sinking returned. He opened the second letter. Stalin had written, “Now you too write two letters.”
Man’s biggest problem is this: without problems your ego cannot be constructed. People say, “How can we be peaceful!” But they do not want peace. Because if you become peaceful, how will the ego stand? You need big problems, challenges, conflict—against them the ego stands erect.
To enlarge the ego people create problems. You do it too. And if for two or four days there is no problem, a great restlessness begins. You feel empty. Nothing comes to mind to do. Being or not being on the earth seems the same. If you are alive, some disturbance is needed. The greater the disturbance, the more alive you feel.
Psychologists say criminals and politicians belong to the same category. A criminal cannot live without committing crime, because by creating disturbance he becomes significant amid the turmoil. And a politician too cannot live without creating disturbance, because without disturbance he has no value, no meaning. That is why great leaders arise in times of war, because it is hard to find a bigger disturbance than war. Therefore, one who wants to be a great leader has to bring about war.
You are doing the same. You raise, seek, create disturbances; if they are not there, you imagine them. All these upheavals leave their shadows, their stains, their wounds inside you; they leave their sorrow. Within you, a ruin gets constructed.
Primal scream—the original cry—is the collective catharsis of all these wounds. Whatever you have piled up—junk, miseries, pains, lies, untruths, deceptions—the ruin you have built within, let it all pour out in a single scream. After it you become utterly light. All the anguish of the mind disappears. It is not even enough to say that; the mind itself disappears.
You won’t need to identify it; suddenly you will find you have grown wings—you can fly. Suddenly you will find gravitation has ceased; the earth no more pulls, the weight is gone; you are weightless. There is no worry ahead or behind. This moment is sufficient. And this moment is deeply delightful. The taste of bliss will tell you that the catharsis has happened. Suffering tells you that catharsis is still pending.
And you don’t even allow the catharsis. You cannot even weep wholeheartedly, cannot scream wholeheartedly. There is no way you do anything wholeheartedly. Everything is half-and-half, false and pretended. Then if the whole life becomes a sad boredom, there is no cause for surprise.
Therefore a seeker needs courage—to throw out what is suppressed within. And if even once you gather the courage, it is not very difficult to throw it out. And once the taste begins—as soon as the load drops and the flavor arises…
I have heard: One day Mulla Nasruddin was walking along, hurling very crude, filthy abuses at his shoes. A friend asked, “What’s the matter?” He looked so depressed, so unhappy, his face as if pricked by thorns. He said, “The shoes are tight, and my feet are in great pain.” The friend said, “Then why don’t you take them off?” Nasruddin said, “That I cannot do.” The friend couldn’t understand. He asked, “Why not?” Nasruddin said, “This is my only support for happiness. When, after a whole day—tired, defeated, frustrated—I return home from shop and business; the wife pounces the moment she sees me—she starts nagging and shouting. The children present their demands. There is no money at hand. After all the pain and misery of the whole day, when I go home and take off my shoes, the bliss of liberation descends. Just by taking off the shoes I feel there is joy in life. There is no other support for happiness—only these shoes are my support.”
You too cling to your suffering, because that suffering is your small glimpse of happiness. When you take it off for a while, you feel a little good. Nasruddin says, “I cannot take off these shoes, because apart from them there is no happiness in life.”
Have you ever noticed what all you call happiness? People call sex happiness; it is nothing more than taking off your shoes. Tensions accumulate. All day you collect tensions. With the outward movement of energy, those tensions slacken; it seems happiness has been found.
Mahavira or Buddha do not attain bliss by conquering sex. Rather, because bliss is attained, sex becomes futile. They do not experience happiness by taking off the shoe; because happiness is already present, there is no need to bear the shoe’s pain and build an expectation of relief.
Loaded with the tensions of the day you go and sit in a movie; you feel pleasure. What kind of pleasure can that be! The eyes get even more tired. But at least for two or three hours you forget yourself; you get absorbed in the story. The more you are occupied, the more self-forgetfulness there is.
But for one who has been in self-forgetfulness the whole day—for one who has no ego, with nothing to forget—does he need to sit in a cinema for three hours to be made to forget? He has taken off the shoes altogether.
With alcohol you get pleasure for a little while. The same ego disappears by drinking. That is why drinkers are humble. Those who have given up drinking are stiff, of harsh nature; they lack even this small device to lay aside the ego.
Therefore you will often find the drinker gentle, friendly, kind; he can be of use when needed. You can rely on him. He won’t be stingy or hard. Because with a little alcohol at least the ego is forgotten—not destroyed, but forgotten for a while.
That is why, when you drink, in a short while the sadness on the face disappears and a cheerfulness appears. The feet get a swing and a dance. This is the same man who, a little earlier, was walking as if dead; his face was such that there seemed no meaning in life. Now his eyes have a sparkle, his face a glow, his feet a rhythm. How did he become so light? Alcohol does not make anyone light; it only lulls the ego to sleep.
That is why the Sufi fakirs say: those who have drunk the wine of God find no meaning in this wine. The wine of God means simply this: those who have dropped the ego itself, who have taken refuge in Him—now there remains nothing to forget. So the ecstasy of the fakirs is like that of drunkards, but of a very profound wine. And the ecstasy of the drunkard is very costly: he gets almost nothing and suffers much. The ecstasy of the fakir is of gaining so much without losing anything.
We cling to suffering and we accumulate it. We even relish it. Watch people when they narrate their tales of woe—how pleased they look! It is strange. If no one listens to your woes, you feel hurt; if someone listens, you enjoy it. And everyone exaggerates his story of suffering.
One of my friends said to me—his wife used to come to me—he said, “Don’t get too involved in what she says. She gets a pimple and reports cancer.” And I found he was right. A pimple—what kind of illness is that! Unless it is cancer, the ego does not get its relish.
You may not have noticed: when you go to a doctor thinking you have caught a great disease, and the doctor says, “There is nothing at all,” you don’t feel good. Inside there is a little hurt; you suspect perhaps this doctor is no good. “For a person like me—nothing, or some trifling thing!” It seems upside down, but inside you it feels as if the coming and going has been useless.
So the dishonest—or shall I say the clever—doctors will look at you and make a very grave face. That soothes your mind. When they take your hand in theirs, it seems to you the situation is very serious. Even if you have nothing, they will inflate something into a disease. The patient is pleased by this. Tell a patient, “It is a mental fancy; there is no illness,” and he becomes your enemy.
No one is ready to accept that we even cling to suffering—but we do. We even magnify it. Then that suffering becomes big and sits upon our head like a stone, upon our chest like a rock. Then we haul it around.
Catharsis means: put the suffering down. Primal scream means: let the suffering be expressed, be released. Let it pour out in a tremendous cry so that the chest becomes light, the heart’s weight drops.
So you will not have to find out, “How shall I know that this was the primal scream?” You will know like this: afterwards you will be immediately light. You will find as if you never had any suffering at all—as if you were always in bliss. As if you had seen a dream of sorrow and the sleep has broken; now there is no dream—and you are laughing.
Third question:
Osho, yesterday you said the roots of passions lie deep in the unconscious, and that a decision for renunciation made only on the intellectual plane is inadequate. How can the awakening of dispassion reach those deep unconscious roots?
Osho, yesterday you said the roots of passions lie deep in the unconscious, and that a decision for renunciation made only on the intellectual plane is inadequate. How can the awakening of dispassion reach those deep unconscious roots?
There is no means other than experience. And we all want something to happen without experience. There is no way without passing through experience, even if it brings pain, even if it burns. Our longing is like gold wishing to be purified without passing through fire. You will have to go through the fire. First thing: you will have to pass through experience.
And keep in mind, another’s experience will not help you. Buddha says, the world is suffering. You can read it, you can listen to it. I say, the world is suffering. You may hear it, understand it. Nothing will happen from that. The danger is that you will become hypocritical.
It must be your own experience that the world is suffering. That is why questions arise like, “How can dispassion become deep?” The question is not how to make dispassion deep; the question is how to live life’s experience totally. But we all want to be cleverer than that...
Buddha underwent suffering and attained dispassion, and thereafter he found bliss. We want to be even more skillful than Buddha: we want to avoid suffering and yet attain the dispassion that happened to Buddha—and the bliss that followed it!
No, it will not happen. Dispassion has its own mathematics. There has never been and never will be any shortcut. And if you have been wandering for so long, it is because you were looking for shortcuts. Otherwise, long ago you too...
Through how many births you have passed! But your hope is that without passing through suffering, without undergoing experience, dispassion should arise. And then from dispassion should come liberation and supreme bliss. You are missing the very first step. Only if you pass through suffering as Buddha did will a dispassion like Buddha’s be born.
And it is not that you lack suffering. There is enough suffering. But you don’t pass through it; you avoid it. You have chosen escape as your path. You are always occupied with how to avoid it.
One who avoids suffering will never give birth to dispassion. Because the depth of suffering itself is the birthplace of dispassion.
Your loved one dies, and you start looking for ways to escape. You do not live the pain of death. You run to ask some pundit, some priest, whether the soul is immortal. Your wife has died, or your husband has died, or your son has died; death stands before you. You go to sadhus and monks asking, “Is the soul immortal?”
You want to deny death: if someone would say the soul is immortal and assure you of it, then there will be no need to weep, no need to be in pain. Why? Because if the soul is immortal, then nothing has happened; only the body has been shed, a garment changed. But the son is alive somewhere; someday there will be a meeting.
Christians and Muslims all think that after death they will meet their relatives again. Then it is only a short separation, just a matter of a few days; endure it. No one is gone, no one has died. You are looking for ways to avoid the pain.
Death stands before you—live its pain. Do not deny it. Do not look for tricks. From the wife with whom you found happiness, live also the sorrow. From the husband whose presence gave you joy, pass through the hell of absence when he is gone. Do not drown it in alcohol, and do not drown it in doctrines. Do not soothe yourself with bhajans and kirtan; do not distract your mind by reading the Gita. Pain stands before you—live it directly. Let the pain itself become your meditation.
Then you will emerge refined from that death. Passing through fire, your gold will be purified; dispassion will arise. Then you will not have to ask me or anyone, “How can dispassion become deep?” Dispassion will deepen on its own.
If you truly see even one death, life becomes futile. If you truly understand a single dry leaf falling from a tree, there remains nothing in life worth grasping.
But no—when someone dies, you begin to console yourself. Even when someone dies, you think it is an accident.
Death is the fundamental fact of life, not an accident. It is no coincidence. It is bound to happen; it is the destiny of life.
When someone dies, you think some mistake occurred, something went wrong, or it must be the fruit of some karma. You forget that death is inherent behind every life; it must be so. Nothing is more certain than that. It is the one absolutely certain fact.
And when another dies, it never occurs to you that this is news of your own death. You think instead of pitying the other, “How unfortunate, poor fellow!” It never occurs to you that whenever anyone dies, it is you who are dying.
Everyone lives as if always the other dies; I never die. And in one sense your logic is right. At least till now you haven’t died. Therefore...
I have heard: a man bought a parrot from a bird shop. The very next day he returned, angry at the shopkeeper: “What sort of parrot did you give me! He died as soon as I took him home.” The shopkeeper said, “I simply cannot accept that, because he has never done such a thing before. He was here for months and never behaved like that. So I just can’t believe it.”
Your logic is the same. Until now you haven’t died, so how can you believe that you will die? And what has not happened so far, why should it happen in the future?
When another dies, you still think it is the other who dies. It doesn’t occur to you that I too will die, or I too am dying, or that this is news of my death.
If you live suffering rightly, every death will feel like your own death. Then dispassion will deepen.
When someone else fails, or when you yourself fail in life, you think circumstances were unfavorable, fate did not support you, others cheated, were cunning, were crooks; therefore they succeeded and I failed. But you never see that life as a whole is a failure. In it there is no such thing as success. Yet you always find some trick to explain it away.
Mulla Nasruddin was passing through a village. Someone had died; a crowd had gathered around the house; the corpse lay before them. Nasruddin was hungry. It was a small village. The whole village was gathered there. No one would be eager to offer him food now; no one was in a mood to treat a guest. And the village was so grief-stricken that to say, “I am hungry, I need food,” would seem crude.
He too stood among the crowd and asked, “What is the matter? Why are you crying?” They said, “Is this something to ask? A member of the family has died. He was dear to the whole village.”
Nasruddin said, “I can bring him back to life. But I am hungry now. First let my stomach be filled, let me bathe, let me do the necessary ritual; I can revive him. There is no need to cry.”
In his hunger he said it. Then when he had eaten his fill, washed up, and came to do the ritual, he couldn’t do it, because now it felt like a hassle—what to do now? Has anyone ever come back to life?
Still, he came, sat by the body, and asked, “Who was this man? What was his profession?” They said, “This man? Obviously, he was a big leader; politics was his profession.” Nasruddin sprang up in anger: “Idiots! You’ve wasted my time! Politicians never come back to life after they die. You should have told me earlier; you’ve ruined my time for nothing. By now I would have reached the next village.”
You too keep looking for excuses in life—this or that—but always you manage to convince yourself that there was some reason for failure.
Buddha’s dispassion deepened because he did not explain things away; he saw directly and found that life is a total failure—no reason is needed. Here, whatever you do, there can be no success; whatever you do, there can be no real happiness; whatever you do, there is nowhere to arrive. It is dream-like.
Whoever begins to see directly finds that his dispassion deepens. And unless dispassion deepens, neither scripture can help nor a master be meaningful. If dispassion is deep, a relationship with a master becomes possible. If dispassion is deep, the meaning of scripture can be revealed. And if dispassion is deep, then even if there is neither master nor scripture, the whole of life becomes your master and scripture.
But there are no tricks to make dispassion deep. There is only one way: live your experience in total truth. Whatever the experience—pleasure or pain; anguish, anxiety, failure—whatever it is, live it totally, live it consciously. That very experience will show you that life is futile, to be let go of. There is nothing here worth holding.
And keep in mind, another’s experience will not help you. Buddha says, the world is suffering. You can read it, you can listen to it. I say, the world is suffering. You may hear it, understand it. Nothing will happen from that. The danger is that you will become hypocritical.
It must be your own experience that the world is suffering. That is why questions arise like, “How can dispassion become deep?” The question is not how to make dispassion deep; the question is how to live life’s experience totally. But we all want to be cleverer than that...
Buddha underwent suffering and attained dispassion, and thereafter he found bliss. We want to be even more skillful than Buddha: we want to avoid suffering and yet attain the dispassion that happened to Buddha—and the bliss that followed it!
No, it will not happen. Dispassion has its own mathematics. There has never been and never will be any shortcut. And if you have been wandering for so long, it is because you were looking for shortcuts. Otherwise, long ago you too...
Through how many births you have passed! But your hope is that without passing through suffering, without undergoing experience, dispassion should arise. And then from dispassion should come liberation and supreme bliss. You are missing the very first step. Only if you pass through suffering as Buddha did will a dispassion like Buddha’s be born.
And it is not that you lack suffering. There is enough suffering. But you don’t pass through it; you avoid it. You have chosen escape as your path. You are always occupied with how to avoid it.
One who avoids suffering will never give birth to dispassion. Because the depth of suffering itself is the birthplace of dispassion.
Your loved one dies, and you start looking for ways to escape. You do not live the pain of death. You run to ask some pundit, some priest, whether the soul is immortal. Your wife has died, or your husband has died, or your son has died; death stands before you. You go to sadhus and monks asking, “Is the soul immortal?”
You want to deny death: if someone would say the soul is immortal and assure you of it, then there will be no need to weep, no need to be in pain. Why? Because if the soul is immortal, then nothing has happened; only the body has been shed, a garment changed. But the son is alive somewhere; someday there will be a meeting.
Christians and Muslims all think that after death they will meet their relatives again. Then it is only a short separation, just a matter of a few days; endure it. No one is gone, no one has died. You are looking for ways to avoid the pain.
Death stands before you—live its pain. Do not deny it. Do not look for tricks. From the wife with whom you found happiness, live also the sorrow. From the husband whose presence gave you joy, pass through the hell of absence when he is gone. Do not drown it in alcohol, and do not drown it in doctrines. Do not soothe yourself with bhajans and kirtan; do not distract your mind by reading the Gita. Pain stands before you—live it directly. Let the pain itself become your meditation.
Then you will emerge refined from that death. Passing through fire, your gold will be purified; dispassion will arise. Then you will not have to ask me or anyone, “How can dispassion become deep?” Dispassion will deepen on its own.
If you truly see even one death, life becomes futile. If you truly understand a single dry leaf falling from a tree, there remains nothing in life worth grasping.
But no—when someone dies, you begin to console yourself. Even when someone dies, you think it is an accident.
Death is the fundamental fact of life, not an accident. It is no coincidence. It is bound to happen; it is the destiny of life.
When someone dies, you think some mistake occurred, something went wrong, or it must be the fruit of some karma. You forget that death is inherent behind every life; it must be so. Nothing is more certain than that. It is the one absolutely certain fact.
And when another dies, it never occurs to you that this is news of your own death. You think instead of pitying the other, “How unfortunate, poor fellow!” It never occurs to you that whenever anyone dies, it is you who are dying.
Everyone lives as if always the other dies; I never die. And in one sense your logic is right. At least till now you haven’t died. Therefore...
I have heard: a man bought a parrot from a bird shop. The very next day he returned, angry at the shopkeeper: “What sort of parrot did you give me! He died as soon as I took him home.” The shopkeeper said, “I simply cannot accept that, because he has never done such a thing before. He was here for months and never behaved like that. So I just can’t believe it.”
Your logic is the same. Until now you haven’t died, so how can you believe that you will die? And what has not happened so far, why should it happen in the future?
When another dies, you still think it is the other who dies. It doesn’t occur to you that I too will die, or I too am dying, or that this is news of my death.
If you live suffering rightly, every death will feel like your own death. Then dispassion will deepen.
When someone else fails, or when you yourself fail in life, you think circumstances were unfavorable, fate did not support you, others cheated, were cunning, were crooks; therefore they succeeded and I failed. But you never see that life as a whole is a failure. In it there is no such thing as success. Yet you always find some trick to explain it away.
Mulla Nasruddin was passing through a village. Someone had died; a crowd had gathered around the house; the corpse lay before them. Nasruddin was hungry. It was a small village. The whole village was gathered there. No one would be eager to offer him food now; no one was in a mood to treat a guest. And the village was so grief-stricken that to say, “I am hungry, I need food,” would seem crude.
He too stood among the crowd and asked, “What is the matter? Why are you crying?” They said, “Is this something to ask? A member of the family has died. He was dear to the whole village.”
Nasruddin said, “I can bring him back to life. But I am hungry now. First let my stomach be filled, let me bathe, let me do the necessary ritual; I can revive him. There is no need to cry.”
In his hunger he said it. Then when he had eaten his fill, washed up, and came to do the ritual, he couldn’t do it, because now it felt like a hassle—what to do now? Has anyone ever come back to life?
Still, he came, sat by the body, and asked, “Who was this man? What was his profession?” They said, “This man? Obviously, he was a big leader; politics was his profession.” Nasruddin sprang up in anger: “Idiots! You’ve wasted my time! Politicians never come back to life after they die. You should have told me earlier; you’ve ruined my time for nothing. By now I would have reached the next village.”
You too keep looking for excuses in life—this or that—but always you manage to convince yourself that there was some reason for failure.
Buddha’s dispassion deepened because he did not explain things away; he saw directly and found that life is a total failure—no reason is needed. Here, whatever you do, there can be no success; whatever you do, there can be no real happiness; whatever you do, there is nowhere to arrive. It is dream-like.
Whoever begins to see directly finds that his dispassion deepens. And unless dispassion deepens, neither scripture can help nor a master be meaningful. If dispassion is deep, a relationship with a master becomes possible. If dispassion is deep, the meaning of scripture can be revealed. And if dispassion is deep, then even if there is neither master nor scripture, the whole of life becomes your master and scripture.
But there are no tricks to make dispassion deep. There is only one way: live your experience in total truth. Whatever the experience—pleasure or pain; anguish, anxiety, failure—whatever it is, live it totally, live it consciously. That very experience will show you that life is futile, to be let go of. There is nothing here worth holding.
Osho's Commentary
That supreme self-luminous state cannot be illumined by the sun, nor by the moon, nor by fire. Having reached which, human beings do not return to this world—that is My supreme abode.
First thing: in this world, whatever we see is seen by the light of something else. You are seeing me; if the electricity goes out, you will not be able to see me. I am seeing you; if the electricity goes, I won’t be able to see you. You are there, but something else is needed by which you are illumined.
In the day things are seen; at night they are not. The eyes are there, things are there, but the sun is not. Everything here needs light from outside. Something else is required to illumine it.
Krishna says: My supreme abode is where neither the sun’s light is needed, nor the moon’s, nor fire. Where no other light is needed. My supreme abode is self-luminous.
This is worth understanding well, because it is a very deep and fundamental basis of all sadhana. Its discovery is the seeker’s goal. What is that phenomenon that is self-luminous? What experience is self-luminous?
Close your eyes and you will not see me. But with closed eyes you will still see yourself. The body may not be seen, yet the fact of your own being is still felt. The lamp may go out; you won’t see me. But you do experience yourself: I am. Your being requires no other light.
So within your being there is an element of consciousness that is self-luminous; its very being is enough in itself. This faint glimpse of consciousness within you—when it becomes fully manifest, Krishna says, that is My supreme abode; that is what I am.
That supreme self-luminous state cannot be illumined by the sun—nor is there any need—nor by the moon nor by fire. And having attained that supreme state, human beings do not return to the world; that is My supreme abode.
Here Krishna says: the more conscious a person becomes, the more he moves toward the supreme abode. And the day the supreme consciousness manifests, there is no need for anything to illumine that consciousness; it is self-luminous.
In this world only one thing is self-luminous: your own being. It needs no proof. Nor is there any way to disprove it. Even if you say, “I am not,” nothing changes; your saying so only proves that you are.
Even a blind person experiences himself. In darkness you still experience yourself. Your eyes may be gone, your ears lost, your hands cut off, your tongue removed, your nose destroyed—still you can experience yourself. You will still be, and there will not be an iota of difference in your sense of being. Because through the eyes others are seen, not oneself. Through the ears, others are heard, not oneself. Even if all the senses are lost, there is no change at all in the inner sense of being.
There, within, there is no light, yet you know that you are. And you have not even entered within yet. If you enter within, you will begin to experience a light there too.
All those who have moved into meditation have experienced light. What light is this?
Kabir says, “As lightning flashes in the sky, so something is happening within me.” Dadu says, “As if a thousand suns have risen at once, so something has arisen within me.” Whether they are Muslim fakirs or Christian mystics, the experience of all is that when the depth of inner meditation is reached, there are experiences of supreme light.
That light is neither the sun’s nor fire’s nor the moon’s. Where does that light come from? It comes from nowhere; you yourself are that light. Your very being is that light.
Krishna calls this light My supreme abode. And one who attains that state does not return to this world. That is the source, the original spring.
And, O Arjuna, in this body the individual soul (jivatma) is truly My eternal fragment; abiding in the maya composed of the three gunas, it attracts the mind along with the five senses.
That very self-luminous mass of light—one fragment of it is hidden within each body.
Understand it like this. Close your eyes and you can see your thoughts. Eyes closed, yet thoughts can be seen. Who sees them? Anger arises within, lust arises—you can see that too. Who sees? The one who sees cannot be seen.
Whatever you can see, that you are not—this is the arithmetic. And that which sees everything but cannot itself be seen—that is you. That is your original source. There is no way to go behind it; otherwise you would see that too. You would stand behind it and see it as well. But you cannot see it.
Everything else can be seen: the body can be seen; the mind’s thoughts can be seen; the heart’s feelings can be seen; kundalini experiences can be seen; everything can be seen. Whatever can be seen is not your nature. The one who sees is your nature—the seer is irreducible. You cannot turn it into an object. It is always the subject; it can never become an object.
When all objects fall away and only the knower remains—and there is nothing left to be known—the supreme light dawns. That light does not come from outside, not from the sun or the moon; it is hidden within you.
The sun will exhaust itself. Its heat is already waning. This electricity will also fail. A lamp burns; the oil will run out and the lamp will go out. Only one flame never goes out because it burns without fuel—the flame of consciousness. No oil feeds it; no fuel, no petrol, no electricity, no helium gas burns it. Therefore there is no way for it to end. It is eternal.
Scientists are searching hard to discover some light that would function without fuel. For all fuels are being depleted; every fuel has limits. Coal is running out, petrol is running out. Sooner or later, all fuels will be exhausted. And man cannot live without fuel. A great difficulty has arisen. Scientists think of a fuel-less energy...
And Krishna is talking about exactly such a light. That light is within everyone. But there is no way to produce it by any device. Consciousness is the very name of that light.
In this body the individual soul is truly My eternal fragment—of that very supreme light—and it attracts the five senses along with the mind while abiding in the maya of the three gunas.
And this fragment of consciousness within you—this alone holds your five senses to itself, sustains them. This needs to be understood, because there is a great delusion about it.
Ordinarily people think the senses have bound you. Krishna says, it is you who are holding the senses. How can the senses bind you? The senses are inert; they cannot bind you. You are bound. And it is your own resolve, your own decision. There is a large process to that decision.
You want to see form. The craving to see is what keeps your eyes tied to you. By the rope of that craving, the eyes remain bound. If your desire to see vanishes, you will become blind this very instant.
A young woman was brought to me. She had suddenly gone blind. Doctors examined her and found no physical defect in the eyes. The eyes were perfectly healthy. So there was no way to treat her. The doctors said it was psychological blindness; nothing could be done.
Someone suggested, and her parents brought her to me. I asked her how it happened, what happened—because if it is a mental event, it will have a history. The mind functions out of the past; the mind is the past. So I asked the parents to leave and spoke to the girl alone.
After questioning and exploring, it came to light that she was in love with the neighbor’s son; she could not live without him. But she was a Brahmin girl; the neighbor was not a Brahmin, not even a Hindu. This love could not continue; marriage was impossible. Her parents blocked everything from all sides; they built a high wall between the two rooftops so they could not see across. From the day the wall was built, her eyesight disappeared.
I asked her what she felt within. She said, “If I cannot see the one I live to see, what is the meaning of these eyes?”
Doctors will not be able to cure this. Her desire to see has withdrawn. The eyes have fallen inert. The current of the wish to see that flows through the eyes—that is what gives them life.
I told her parents there was only one remedy: bring down that wall. Remove whatever barriers you have erected. Or else accept that your daughter will remain blind.
They understood—which is a great miracle, because parents rarely understand anything. They agreed. The wall need not even be pulled down; the moment they agreed—in front of me—the girl’s sight returned. The desire to see began to flow again.
You hold the eyes because you want to see. You hold the ears because you want to hear. You hold the hands because you want to touch. Your wanting is the bridge between your senses and you.
Therefore Buddha said: Don’t gouge out the eyes; closing the ears will do nothing. Drop desire—remove the wanting—and the connection with the senses slowly, on its own, falls away.
Remember, you have been told that the senses have bound you, that the senses are enemies. Krishna says exactly the opposite. He says: you desired the senses; you used them. You yourself drew them and held them; therefore they are there. And the day you decide, the day your direction changes and your current begins to flow inward, that very day the senses will disappear.
Do not blame the senses. The fault is no one’s. It is your resolve. Your consciousness wishes to live in this body; therefore it is in the body. The day it no longer wishes to, that day the body will be dropped.
If this is understood, the hostility you carry toward the senses will cease. It is stupid; it has no value; it is wrong. Its consequences are terrible, because you waste your energy fighting the senses—and the fight is meaningless there. The fight should be elsewhere: the fight should be to lessen my own grasping at the senses.
It is that same one who attracts the mind along with the five senses. As the wind carries fragrances from their source, so too does the embodied soul, the lord of the body, when it leaves one body, take along the mind and senses and enter another body.
When you die, you carry your subtle senses with you—just as the wind carries the fragrance of flowers. It cannot carry the flower; the flower remains behind. But a gust of wind carries the flower’s fragrance along. Your consciousness cannot carry the body, but it carries with it, like a scent, the craving to cling to the body.
On the basis of that craving—Hindus have called that the subtle senses. The eye is a gross sense; the craving to see is a subtle sense. The tongue is a gross sense; the longing for taste is a subtle sense. The flowers are left behind.
You will be surprised to know that when Hindus collect the bones of the dead from the cremation ground, they call them “flowers.” It is a truly beautiful word.
The flowers are left lying, but the fragrance goes with you. And that fragrance that goes with you seeks new births. It searches for new bodies, new wombs. And according to your cravings, such a womb becomes available to you.
Whatever you want to be—whatever wanting you have accumulated—that alone crystallizes. You build a new body... you grasp a new body.
This will continue as long as the wind carries fragrance. It ceases the day the wind leaves not only the flowers but the fragrance as well—the wind flies empty.
Buddha flies like this. Mahavira flies like this. They leave the flowers and the fragrance. Then no body is available, no womb is available. There remains no way to enter any body. You must carry the means of entry with you.
And entering that body, this soul, taking shelter in ear, eye, and skin, and in the tongue, nose, and mind—by means of these—enjoys the objects.
Then the journey begins anew. Then the same enjoyments begin again. Flowers change; the journey of fragrance continues. Senses change; the journey of craving continues.
Do not drop the senses; drop the cravings. The senses drop away by themselves. But we find it easier to drop the senses. Someone leaves food; someone gives up salt; someone gives up ghee; someone gives up sugar; someone walks with eyes lowered; someone becomes frightened of the touch of a woman; someone refuses the touch of fine cloth. All this is giving up the senses.
It is like someone disgusted with life committing suicide. But suicide does not end life; only the body changes. No sooner are you dead than a new body is taken up. The one who commits suicide is even more likely to obtain a deformed body—because the mind of one who wished to destroy himself is in a distorted state, and the imprint of that distortion—the suicide—will remain upon him.
You set yourself on fire. You will not burn in a moment. Before burning, you will think, vacillate; distortions will gather inside. Then you will light the fire. Then you will writhe. In that writhing fire, you will want to save yourself and yet be unable. You will cry out, scream, think it was a mistake; great regret will arise, great torment, great pain. And in that pain you will die.
The imprint of that pain—those repressed cravings, those burning flames—their stench will go with you. The fragrance will go, and the stench too; the fever will go. And the new womb you take will be fevered and distorted; you will be born crippled, blind, broken—born like a ruin. Because the attempt you made to ruin yourself has left its samskara on you.
This much we can understand: that to kill oneself is a sin, bad, and will have evil consequences. But people commit small suicides, and we do not recognize them.
A man sits with eyes shut. That is one-fifth suicide—because there are five senses. Someone burned all five at once, and someone burns one by closing the eyes.
We have heard the story of Surdas. If Surdas was a sensible man, the story must be false. If the story is true, then Surdas could not have been sensible. The story is that upon seeing a beautiful young woman, he gouged out his eyes.
This logic can be understood; there are many Surdases like that. But the desire that arises upon seeing a beautiful woman is not coming from the woman; it is arising from within me. Not even from my eyes—from within me, passing through the eyes.
That beautiful woman may not even know that someone became a Surdas because of her. And the eyes were not at fault either. The eyes went where I wanted to take them. The eyes saw what I wanted to see. The eyes desired what my desire was. The eyes were following me. And I gouged out the eyes.
That is one-fifth suicide. We call such a person a sadhu. But this too is a distortion. One who commits this kind of suicide also arrives at a bad end.
The question is not to destroy the senses; the question is to be free of the senses. And the senses have not bound you; you have bound them. So there is no fault in the senses. Nor is there any fault in you—if this is what you want; then there is no fault. But let it happen consciously. Then be happy in it. Then do not hanker after dispassion.
You are desiring attachment and you raise questions about dispassion—then you fall into a split.
Every day people come to me with one sorrow: the conflict between attachment and dispassion. Attachment is the juice of their life, and hearing the words of some crazies, dispassion has also caught hold of them. So dispassion whirls in their head while attachment is their condition. Now they travel under two flags; they suffer greatly, become divided, split: two persons inside. One pulls toward attachment, one pulls toward dispassion.
No self-realization will come out of this torment. Attachment and dispassion cannot live together. As long as attachment is there, you cannot grasp dispassion; you can only think of it in words. Thinking in words has no meaning; it is lifeless.
Mulla Nasruddin and his wife had a quarrel; they stopped speaking—just as often happens with husband and wife. Even when they are speaking, they are not speaking; but sometimes it stops altogether.
Nasruddin’s wife had to go somewhere early in the morning; it was cold. How could she tell her husband? And whenever speech stops, the husband has to start it again; the wife never starts. It is not the nature of a woman to take the initiative.
The wife was in a bind. It was winter; she had to get up early. She wrote a note and gave it to Nasruddin: “Mulla, wake me at five in the morning.” Nasruddin put the note in his pocket.
In the morning when the wife awoke, she was astonished: the sun had risen, it was around eight. She could not say anything to Nasruddin—speech was stopped. She looked around; there was a note on her bed: “Madam, it is five o’clock. Please wake up.”
That is how your dispassion can be—paper dispassion. You will not get up; you will remain asleep in attachment, while notes of dispassion flutter around you. Dispassion that comes from scripture is paper-thin.
Understand your attachment rightly. And understand too that it is my resolve. I myself have decided this, even if decided countless births ago. It is my own decision that I undertake the journey of the body; that I plunge into the ocean of this world; that I sink into this tree of the world—that is my decision. I am the master. The day I change this decision, that day the current will turn. No one is carrying me along.
This Hindu vision is unique: no one is carrying me; I am the owner—even in this bondage I am the owner. I am going; it is my choice. And if I have chosen even this slavery, then the very moment I wish it, I can break it. When this is remembered, the direction can change.
Therefore, in a single moment samadhi can happen; in a single moment awakening can arise. One does not need countless births to become a Buddha. The event can happen in a single moment.
Krishna is telling Arjuna: My own fragment dwells within you, within everyone. That very fragment has grasped the senses. And that same fragment carries the fragrance of those senses into new journeys. The moment you know that your resolve is your journey, that very moment—if you wish—the journey can stop. And if you wish to journey, you may—then the journey will be play; it will be leela. Because you are doing it; no one is making you do it. It is your own joy.
In this regard there is a great revolutionary point. Christians think that God punished man; therefore the world is. Adam erred, sinned, so Adam was expelled. Muslims think likewise. Jains think that man committed some sin, some karma bondage; therefore he wanders. Buddha too thinks so.
The Hindu thinking is very unique. Hindu chintana says: this is your resolve. Neither is it your sin, nor has anyone punished you, nor is there anyone sitting to punish you. And how will you commit sin? At some point you must have begun! On the very first day you must have done something without any previous karma. Today it may be that what I do is because of past karma; because of past births and past deeds. But in the primal moment, without any past karma, I must have done something. That must have been my resolve; it was what I desired.
If out of my desire alone the tree of the world exists, then out of my desire alone it can end. Attachment (raag) is the resolve to descend into the world; dispassion (vairagya) is the resolve to go beyond the world.
That is all for today.