[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been copy-typed. It is for reference purposes only.]
(To Francesco) -- Your name: Swami Francesco. It is a beautiful name; it precisely defines sannyas: It means living in freedom.
The only freedom is the freedom from the mind. All other freedoms are false. Political, economical, ideological -- They are simply changing From one prison into another. While you are changing it looks like freedom The newness of the new prison, the novelty of it Gives you a sense of freedom but Soon one realizes that one is trapped again. This has been the whole history Of human revolutions. The very few people who have attained freedom Are those who have attained by dropping the mind; Becoming absolutely silent is freedom. Living out of that silence is freedom.
(To Ivan) -- This is your name: Swami Prem Ivan. Prem means love. Ivan means god's gracious gift.
Love is the greatest gift of god But we go on carrying it as a potential, We never actualize it; the seed remains a seed. We never help it to grow into a tree We never work hard to bring it to flowering Hence the misery of life.
The blissful person is one Who has bloomed, blossomed Whose love is released Whose love has become a fragrance Who has expressed his heart Who has sung his song.
(To Anna) -- Your name: Ma Anna. Anna means prayer.
God has no language Except the language of silence, so if you talk In Hebrew or in Arabic or in Sanskrit You are wasting your time -- he won't understand. There are three thousand languages on the earth And scientists say there are at least Fifty thousand earths where life Has evolved almost to the same point as here. So you can think how many languages There must be in the whole universe. To talk to god is stupid.
And by prayer it has been always thought That you have to say something -- That is absolutely wrong: You have to learn To be silent, in a deep surrender And unsaid thankfulness, unuttered love, That is prayer. Say it and you have to destroy it Say it and you have to falsify it. Say it and you have to make it mundane. Leave it unsaid, unmanifested Because god is unmanifest. If you can leave your love For existence unmanifest Then there is immediate communion And that communion is prayer. To me, meditation and prayer are not different They are two names for the same phenomenon.
Be silent -- You can call it meditation, you can call it prayer But learn to be silent, Learn to listen to existence. Rather than talking to god, listen to him! And he is speaking: Through the wind passing through the pine trees And the sound of running water And the fragrance of flowers And the songs of the birds -- These are all his messages. On each leaf is his signature The whole existence it his scripture.
Learn to be silent, learn how to listen Thankfully, gratefully, in a deep trust and love And then you will know what prayer is. It is a very subtle phenomenon It is a flame in the heart, a light in the heart A radiance in the heart, a dance in the heart!
(To Helga) -- This is your name: Ma Helga Helga means holy.
But the word 'holy' Has been misused by the priests for centuries. They have made it synonymous With the virtuous, the pious, the religious -- It is not synonymous with those words. It is a far bigger phenomenon. Piousness, religiousness, virtuousness Are simply few aspects of holiness. They are not synonymous with it Just few fragments of it. Holiness really means wholeness; A person who is whole is holy. A person who lives life in its wholeness is holy. Your saints are not holy -- they may be religious They may be very virtuous, they may be pious But they are not holy because Their life is a very paralysed life Crippled life, one-dimensional. They don't live life in its totality. They reject much They choose only few parts of life and they try To remain confined to those few parts. They are choosers And a chooser can never be holy.
To be holy means To live in a choiceless awareness And to live life in all its colors In all its possibilities. One has to be a rainbow, all the seven colors. One has to live All the sweetness and the bitterness The days and the nights, the good and the bad. A really whole person Is as much a saint as he is a sinner Because he is whole! The sinner is not whole, the saint is not whole They are partial, they have chosen. They are against each other: What the saint has chosen The sinner has rejected What the sinner has chosen The saint has rejected But the whole person does not reject because To reject anything is to reject god Because god is total: to really love god One needs courage, the guts To live life in its wholeness without any choice And that's what I teach here. My sannyasin has to be really holy Holy in the sense of wholeness.
(To Heidi) -- This is your name: Ma Dhyan Heidi. Dhyan means meditation. Heidi means nobleness.
Nobleness arises out of meditation It has nothing to do with birth. It certainly has to do something with a new birth Not the ordinary birth but a birth That happens inside you though meditation. When the mind dies, the ego dies And you are born anew, egoless Mindless, as pure consciousness, then The fragrance of that consciousness is nobleness; Then your life has a beauty, a grace of its own. It radiates peace It creates an atmosphere around it of bliss. The very presence of such a person Brings a climate of joy. Wherever he goes spring follows him -- That is true nobleness.
(To Michael) -- Your name: Swami Michael. Michael means godly.
Everyone is godly But very few people are aware of the fact. People are fast asleep And dreaming all kinds of things. In their dreams They have become something else than they are. The dream is a distraction from your nature The dream Always takes you away from where you are. Have you watched this quality of the dream? -- If you are sleeping in a room You never dream of the same room -- never. I have observed thousands of people's dreams: They never dream of the same room, the same bed The same woman they are sleeping with -- never. They may be on the moon They may be even on the sun, but they can't Be in the same room where they are sleeping. They may be with Sophia Loren But not with the woman they are sleeping with. And they may be elephants, lions, centipedes Anything -- but never the person they are.
That is one of the basic quality of a dream that It takes you away from where you are It distracts you from your nature. That's why very few people Are aware of their godliness Otherwise everyone is a god. We come from god, we are born out of him We are part of him, we can't be alive without him. He is our life, he is our breath He is our heartbeat, but we are absolutely unaware.
To be a sannyasin means A tremendous effort to wake up So that you can know who you are. And the day it is known Your life is transformed. You live in the same world But you are no more the same Hence the world is no more the same. Right now it is all misery and a night mare Once you are awake it is paradise The very paradise; suddenly you know That Adam and Eve never left paradise They had only fallen asleep and started dreaming That they had been expelled. It is a dream that the serpent has persuaded Eve That 'Eat this apple.' Now how apple can take you out of paradise?
I have been eating so many apples, just to see Whether it can drive me out of paradise. It has not done anything of that sort! After at least thirty years of experimentation I can tell you: That is all nonsense! They dreamt, otherwise serpents don't speak. But in dreams everything is possible Serpents speak. It is only a dream story. Adam and Eve are still in paradise because There is nowhere else to go. Even if god wants to expel, where will he expel? The whole is full of him, the whole belongs to him There is no other place. There is no place where he is not. So everywhere is paradise All that is needed is an awakening And that can easily be done. Very small devices can help, mm? Just an alarm clock can do it. All techniques of meditation Are nothing but alarm clocks Simple devices to wake you up. -- How long will you be here? -- Ten days more, then I leave. -- Try to wake up! (much laughter) And if you cannot then come back again! Good!
(To Eckhard) -- Your name: Swami Eckhard. Eckhard means courageous spirit.
That is the only requirement For being a sannyasin -- nothing else is required. I don't ask you to be virtuous A man of great character, moral, pious; I simply ask one thing: If you are courageous enough Then everything is possible, Even the impossible is possible.
Courage is the most fundamental religious value Although it has never been accepted like that. On the contrary, all the religions Have exploited man's cowardice: They make you afraid And once you are trembling in fear You are easily exploitable, manipulatable. Then the priests Can take you under their protections And they can say, 'Son, don't be worried -- We will protect you, we will pray for you. You just follow what we say, you do what we say And we will see that you reach heaven. If you don't follow us, If you don't listen to us, you will fall into hell.' And they have depicted hell so colorfully that Anybody will become afraid. And they have described heaven so beautifully It creates greed. Hell creates fear, heaven creates greed. And between these two the whole humanity Has been reduced into a spiritual slavery.
My sannyasin is not a spiritual slave He is a rebel. Religion has nothing to do with slavery It is pure rebellion; hence I say Courageousness is The most fundamental quality. And we need now courageous people in the world So that they can destroy all these strategies Which are rooted in man's consciousness. They have exploited humanity so long, it is time That it all should be stopped And stopped forever.
(To Nelly) -- This is your name: Ma Anand Nelly. Anand means bliss. Nelly means a vigilant spirit.
Bliss is a by-product of awareness, of vigilance. Vigilance is the very essence of meditation; one has to be watchful, alert, awake. The watchfulness has to go slowly slowly deeper. First be watchful of your actions, that means watchfulness of your body -- walking, sitting, lying down, taking a shower. In all the gestures of the body you should keep a little alertness, of what is happening, of what you are doing. And you will be surprised, as you become watchful your actions take on a new quality; they become graceful, they are no more hurried. They start radiating a certain peace, a certain joy. And then the second watchfulness is about the thoughts, what thoughts are moving in the mind. No effort to interfere, no need to stop, no need to fight, just remain vigilant -- that is awareness of the mind. And if the first becomes possible, the second is not difficult; but start from the first.
Many people start from the second and find it very difficult -- it is natural. If you start from the second it will be difficult. One should start from the gross and then go on to the subtle and then to the subtlest. When you have become capable of being vigilant of thoughts, you will be surprised, they are disappearing. The more you become aware the less they are. When you are perfectly aware, they simply evaporate, a silence prevails. Bodily actions become graceful when you become watchful and when you become watchful of the mind, mind becomes utterly non-existential. All turmoil ceases. There is pure silence, a soundless silence. Then turn to your feelings, the subtlest; your emotions, your sentiments. Then become vigilant of them.
These are the three watchfulnesses and if one can become watchful of all these three then the fourth happens on its own accord -- that you have not to do. When you succeed in all these three, the fourth is the reward: you become aware of your being. That is a gift from god, that is self-realization. Watching your feelings, feelings will also disappear. And when there are no thoughts and no feelings then you are only body and being. These two are realities: body belongs to the earth and the being belongs to the beyond. These are two realities, they cannot disappear. Thoughts and feelings are just by-products, epiphenomena; they are not realities they are both shadows, so both disappear. Body remains but now it is very graceful; being resides in the body and the body becomes the temple of the being. Now you know the body will die. But you die gracefully and you know also that your being is undying so there is no fear left. Make your name your sadhana, your very practise, your very spiritual effort.
(To Thomas) -- This is your name: Swami Atmanand. Atmanand means self is bliss.
Bliss is not something outside you It is your very nature. Hence it has not to be achieved It has only to be discovered. It is already the case Just you have to dig within your own being. You have to go inwards and you will find it. Right now it is there Just a connection has to be made A bridge has be created. And all the meditations are nothing but bridges; Bridges between you and your own self. Once this is understood That bliss is not somewhere outside Your life takes a radical change Your search becomes inner, otherwise People are running after money, power, prestige Hoping that by attaining these things They will find bliss - they will not find anything They will only find That their whole life has been a wastage. With the same effort they would have arrived At the very kingdom of god.
(To Heidi) -- This is your name: Ma Devi. Devi means goddess.
One has to be reminded That one is a god or a goddess. It is only a question of remembering It is not something that you have to become. You are that from the very beginning You have never been otherwise. The function of the master is to remind you To help you to be aware of the fact that you are. The master is not to indoctrinate you He does not give you creeds and dogmas And doctrines and philosophies. He simply shakes you, shocks you, so that You can become a little awake, alert And something that you have forgotten Can be remembered again. It is a forgotten language Which can be remembered; it is just there But on top of it there is much rubbish Which has gathered in many many lives: Experiences, knowledge, scriptures, ideologies -- All that rubbish has to be thrown out You have to be emptied of that rubbish. Once that rubbish is thrown out Your innermost core Shines forth like a Kohinoor.
Osho's Commentary
(To Francesco) -- Your name: Swami Francesco.
It is a beautiful name; it precisely defines sannyas:
It means living in freedom.
The only freedom is the freedom from the mind.
All other freedoms are false.
Political, economical, ideological --
They are simply changing
From one prison into another.
While you are changing it looks like freedom
The newness of the new prison, the novelty of it
Gives you a sense of freedom but
Soon one realizes that one is trapped again.
This has been the whole history
Of human revolutions.
The very few people who have attained freedom
Are those who have attained by dropping the mind;
Becoming absolutely silent is freedom.
Living out of that silence is freedom.
(To Ivan) -- This is your name: Swami Prem Ivan.
Prem means love. Ivan means god's gracious gift.
Love is the greatest gift of god
But we go on carrying it as a potential,
We never actualize it; the seed remains a seed.
We never help it to grow into a tree
We never work hard to bring it to flowering
Hence the misery of life.
The blissful person is one
Who has bloomed, blossomed
Whose love is released
Whose love has become a fragrance
Who has expressed his heart
Who has sung his song.
(To Anna) -- Your name: Ma Anna. Anna means prayer.
God has no language
Except the language of silence, so if you talk
In Hebrew or in Arabic or in Sanskrit
You are wasting your time -- he won't understand.
There are three thousand languages on the earth
And scientists say there are at least
Fifty thousand earths where life
Has evolved almost to the same point as here.
So you can think how many languages
There must be in the whole universe.
To talk to god is stupid.
And by prayer it has been always thought
That you have to say something --
That is absolutely wrong: You have to learn
To be silent, in a deep surrender
And unsaid thankfulness, unuttered love,
That is prayer.
Say it and you have to destroy it
Say it and you have to falsify it.
Say it and you have to make it mundane.
Leave it unsaid, unmanifested
Because god is unmanifest.
If you can leave your love
For existence unmanifest
Then there is immediate communion
And that communion is prayer.
To me, meditation and prayer are not different
They are two names for the same phenomenon.
Be silent --
You can call it meditation, you can call it prayer
But learn to be silent,
Learn to listen to existence.
Rather than talking to god, listen to him!
And he is speaking:
Through the wind passing through the pine trees
And the sound of running water
And the fragrance of flowers
And the songs of the birds --
These are all his messages.
On each leaf is his signature
The whole existence it his scripture.
Learn to be silent, learn how to listen
Thankfully, gratefully, in a deep trust and love
And then you will know what prayer is.
It is a very subtle phenomenon
It is a flame in the heart, a light in the heart
A radiance in the heart, a dance in the heart!
(To Helga) -- This is your name: Ma Helga
Helga means holy.
But the word 'holy'
Has been misused by the priests for centuries.
They have made it synonymous
With the virtuous, the pious, the religious --
It is not synonymous with those words.
It is a far bigger phenomenon.
Piousness, religiousness, virtuousness
Are simply few aspects of holiness.
They are not synonymous with it
Just few fragments of it.
Holiness really means wholeness;
A person who is whole is holy.
A person who lives life in its wholeness is holy.
Your saints are not holy -- they may be religious
They may be very virtuous, they may be pious
But they are not holy because
Their life is a very paralysed life
Crippled life, one-dimensional.
They don't live life in its totality.
They reject much
They choose only few parts of life and they try
To remain confined to those few parts.
They are choosers
And a chooser can never be holy.
To be holy means
To live in a choiceless awareness
And to live life in all its colors
In all its possibilities.
One has to be a rainbow, all the seven colors.
One has to live
All the sweetness and the bitterness
The days and the nights, the good and the bad.
A really whole person
Is as much a saint as he is a sinner
Because he is whole!
The sinner is not whole, the saint is not whole
They are partial, they have chosen.
They are against each other: What the saint has chosen
The sinner has rejected
What the sinner has chosen
The saint has rejected
But the whole person does not reject because
To reject anything is to reject god
Because god is total: to really love god
One needs courage, the guts
To live life in its wholeness without any choice
And that's what I teach here.
My sannyasin has to be really holy
Holy in the sense of wholeness.
(To Heidi) -- This is your name: Ma Dhyan Heidi.
Dhyan means meditation. Heidi means nobleness.
Nobleness arises out of meditation
It has nothing to do with birth.
It certainly has to do something with a new birth
Not the ordinary birth but a birth
That happens inside you though meditation.
When the mind dies, the ego dies
And you are born anew, egoless
Mindless, as pure consciousness, then
The fragrance of that consciousness is nobleness;
Then your life has a beauty, a grace of its own.
It radiates peace
It creates an atmosphere around it of bliss.
The very presence of such a person
Brings a climate of joy.
Wherever he goes spring follows him --
That is true nobleness.
(To Michael) -- Your name: Swami Michael.
Michael means godly.
Everyone is godly
But very few people are aware of the fact.
People are fast asleep
And dreaming all kinds of things.
In their dreams
They have become something else than they are.
The dream is a distraction from your nature
The dream
Always takes you away from where you are.
Have you watched this quality of the dream? --
If you are sleeping in a room
You never dream of the same room -- never.
I have observed thousands of people's dreams:
They never dream of the same room, the same bed
The same woman they are sleeping with -- never.
They may be on the moon
They may be even on the sun, but they can't
Be in the same room where they are sleeping.
They may be with Sophia Loren
But not with the woman they are sleeping with.
And they may be elephants, lions, centipedes
Anything -- but never the person they are.
That is one of the basic quality of a dream that
It takes you away from where you are
It distracts you from your nature.
That's why very few people
Are aware of their godliness
Otherwise everyone is a god.
We come from god, we are born out of him
We are part of him, we can't be alive without him.
He is our life, he is our breath
He is our heartbeat, but we are absolutely unaware.
To be a sannyasin means
A tremendous effort to wake up
So that you can know who you are.
And the day it is known
Your life is transformed.
You live in the same world
But you are no more the same
Hence the world is no more the same.
Right now it is all misery and a night mare
Once you are awake it is paradise
The very paradise; suddenly you know
That Adam and Eve never left paradise
They had only fallen asleep and started dreaming
That they had been expelled.
It is a dream that the serpent has persuaded Eve
That 'Eat this apple.'
Now how apple can take you out of paradise?
I have been eating so many apples, just to see
Whether it can drive me out of paradise.
It has not done anything of that sort!
After at least thirty years of experimentation
I can tell you: That is all nonsense!
They dreamt, otherwise serpents don't speak.
But in dreams everything is possible
Serpents speak. It is only a dream story.
Adam and Eve are still in paradise because
There is nowhere else to go.
Even if god wants to expel, where will he expel?
The whole is full of him, the whole belongs to him
There is no other place.
There is no place where he is not.
So everywhere is paradise
All that is needed is an awakening
And that can easily be done.
Very small devices can help, mm?
Just an alarm clock can do it.
All techniques of meditation
Are nothing but alarm clocks
Simple devices to wake you up.
-- How long will you be here?
-- Ten days more, then I leave.
-- Try to wake up! (much laughter) And if you cannot then come back again! Good!
(To Eckhard) -- Your name: Swami Eckhard.
Eckhard means courageous spirit.
That is the only requirement
For being a sannyasin -- nothing else is required.
I don't ask you to be virtuous
A man of great character, moral, pious;
I simply ask one thing:
If you are courageous enough
Then everything is possible,
Even the impossible is possible.
Courage is the most fundamental religious value
Although it has never been accepted like that.
On the contrary, all the religions
Have exploited man's cowardice:
They make you afraid
And once you are trembling in fear
You are easily exploitable, manipulatable.
Then the priests
Can take you under their protections
And they can say, 'Son, don't be worried --
We will protect you, we will pray for you.
You just follow what we say, you do what we say
And we will see that you reach heaven.
If you don't follow us,
If you don't listen to us, you will fall into hell.'
And they have depicted hell so colorfully that
Anybody will become afraid.
And they have described heaven so beautifully
It creates greed.
Hell creates fear, heaven creates greed.
And between these two the whole humanity
Has been reduced into a spiritual slavery.
My sannyasin is not a spiritual slave
He is a rebel.
Religion has nothing to do with slavery
It is pure rebellion; hence I say
Courageousness is
The most fundamental quality.
And we need now courageous people in the world
So that they can destroy all these strategies
Which are rooted in man's consciousness.
They have exploited humanity so long, it is time
That it all should be stopped
And stopped forever.
(To Nelly) -- This is your name: Ma Anand Nelly. Anand means bliss. Nelly means a vigilant spirit.
Bliss is a by-product of awareness, of vigilance. Vigilance is the very essence of meditation; one has to be watchful, alert, awake. The watchfulness has to go slowly slowly deeper. First be watchful of your actions, that means watchfulness of your body -- walking, sitting, lying down, taking a shower. In all the gestures of the body you should keep a little alertness, of what is happening, of what you are doing. And you will be surprised, as you become watchful your actions take on a new quality; they become graceful, they are no more hurried. They start radiating a certain peace, a certain joy. And then the second watchfulness is about the thoughts, what thoughts are moving in the mind. No effort to interfere, no need to stop, no need to fight, just remain vigilant -- that is awareness of the mind. And if the first becomes possible, the second is not difficult; but start from the first.
Many people start from the second and find it very difficult -- it is natural. If you start from the second it will be difficult. One should start from the gross and then go on to the subtle and then to the subtlest. When you have become capable of being vigilant of thoughts, you will be surprised, they are disappearing. The more you become aware the less they are. When you are perfectly aware, they simply evaporate, a silence prevails. Bodily actions become graceful when you become watchful and when you become watchful of the mind, mind becomes utterly non-existential. All turmoil ceases. There is pure silence, a soundless silence. Then turn to your feelings, the subtlest; your emotions, your sentiments. Then become vigilant of them.
These are the three watchfulnesses and if one can become watchful of all these three then the fourth happens on its own accord -- that you have not to do. When you succeed in all these three, the fourth is the reward: you become aware of your being. That is a gift from god, that is self-realization. Watching your feelings, feelings will also disappear. And when there are no thoughts and no feelings then you are only body and being. These two are realities: body belongs to the earth and the being belongs to the beyond. These are two realities, they cannot disappear. Thoughts and feelings are just by-products, epiphenomena; they are not realities they are both shadows, so both disappear. Body remains but now it is very graceful; being resides in the body and the body becomes the temple of the being. Now you know the body will die. But you die gracefully and you know also that your being is undying so there is no fear left.
Make your name your sadhana, your very practise, your very spiritual effort.
(To Thomas) -- This is your name: Swami Atmanand.
Atmanand means self is bliss.
Bliss is not something outside you
It is your very nature.
Hence it has not to be achieved
It has only to be discovered.
It is already the case
Just you have to dig within your own being.
You have to go inwards and you will find it.
Right now it is there
Just a connection has to be made
A bridge has be created.
And all the meditations are nothing but bridges;
Bridges between you and your own self.
Once this is understood
That bliss is not somewhere outside
Your life takes a radical change
Your search becomes inner, otherwise
People are running after money, power, prestige
Hoping that by attaining these things
They will find bliss - they will not find anything
They will only find
That their whole life has been a wastage.
With the same effort they would have arrived
At the very kingdom of god.
(To Heidi) -- This is your name: Ma Devi.
Devi means goddess.
One has to be reminded
That one is a god or a goddess.
It is only a question of remembering
It is not something that you have to become.
You are that from the very beginning
You have never been otherwise.
The function of the master is to remind you
To help you to be aware of the fact that you are.
The master is not to indoctrinate you
He does not give you creeds and dogmas
And doctrines and philosophies.
He simply shakes you, shocks you, so that
You can become a little awake, alert
And something that you have forgotten
Can be remembered again.
It is a forgotten language
Which can be remembered; it is just there
But on top of it there is much rubbish
Which has gathered in many many lives:
Experiences, knowledge, scriptures, ideologies --
All that rubbish has to be thrown out
You have to be emptied of that rubbish.
Once that rubbish is thrown out
Your innermost core
Shines forth like a Kohinoor.