[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been copy-typed. It is for reference purposes only.]
(To Oliver) -- This is your name: Swami Anand Oliver. Anand means bliss. Oliver means a peaceful heart.
It is easy to be blissful without being peaceful It is also easy to be peaceful Without being blissful. The problem and the challenge is To be both together. And unless one is both together One remains half, incomplete. When both are together, Merging, melting into each other That it is absolutely impossible Even to demarcate which is which, Then only a person is total, Then only one is whole And to be whole is to be holy.
Because it was easy to be peaceful Many religions chose it, just to be peaceful Hence the escapist tendency for centuries Has prevailed in religions: Escape from the world because If you are in the world the peace is disturbed There are thousand and one Causes for disturbance; it is better To go to the mountains, to the monasteries Disappear behind the walls of a monastery Avoid all provocations, temptations And remain peaceful. Slowly slowly it becomes a habit But that peace it cold, It is almost like death.
Hence if you go to an old monastery You will find people like corpses, utterly cold; Peaceful, but no joy, no dance, no song. It is the peace of the cemetery It is a kind a suicide: Escape is suicide.
Life is in the world and real peace Has to happen in the world, not outside it.
Few schools of mystics Have chosen the other part, to be blissful. For example, Sufis: they live in the world In fact it is very difficult To find out who is a Sufi because They live in the world in the ordinary way. The only thing that can create suspicion in you That something is special about them It their blissfulness; they are always In a kind of ecstasy, a certain excitement Something is happening inside them. But because it is not peaceful That excitement creates a state of fever It becomes to hot, they become almost mad. Hence only in Sufis There is a certain state of mystics called The mad ones, the mastas. It can't happen in a Catholic monastery It can't happen in the life of a Jaina monk It can't happen to a Buddhist, It can happen only to a Sufi: He can go mad because he becomes to excited And there is nothing to hold him back. The excitement reaches to such an extreme That it is maddening! He is very alive, but it is not a state of health Something is berserk about it Something is crazy about it. He looks drugged, stoned.
My effort here is to bring a synthesis: One should be blissful and peaceful together. Then the peace will prevent any kind of madness And the bliss will prevent any kind of death. The peace will keep you cool And the bliss will keep you warm. And when you are cool and warm together There is tremendous beauty Your life is silent Yet there is a song in that silence. To me that is the ultimate goal of sannyas.
(To Eldine) -- This is your name: Ma Anand Amrita. Anand means bliss. Amrita means nectar.
The experience of bliss Is the experience of immortality; They are not two things, they are not separate. They are not separable. Once you have tasted bliss You have also tasted the deathless in you. Bliss is possible only When you reach to the very center of your being And that center is beyond death, beyond birth. It does not exist in time It does not exist in space either, It is beyond both. It is non-temporal, non spatial It is eternity itself; in other words: It is godliness, it is divineness.
Man's whole neurosis consists of fear. Fear of death Is the root cause of all other fears, Other fears are just branches. But if you go to the root of any fear You will find death somewhere Hidden behind. Hence the mystery, the anxiety, the anguish. Even though one has money, power, prestige Everything -- but something is missing: one knows All these things will go down the drain One knows 'I am myself going down the drain Every day, every moment. One knows that this life is unreliable; Tomorrow I may not be at all.' Hence there is a shadow of death Continuously following you And there is no way to escape from it; Wherever you go it is with you. There is only one way to get rid of it And that is to go within Nowhere else but within. That is the way of meditation: going inwards Tasting your own subjectivity Going slowly slowly out of the mind In a state of no-mind Where you are only conscious And these is nothing to be conscious about; No object remains, only pure subjectivity Just a mirror reflecting nothing. In that very moment, bliss explodes! It is just like atomic explosion: you become Full of light and full of joy and full of life And life that knows no beginning and no end And light that once known remains forever. Hence I say, to know bliss is the same As to know immortality.
That's why everybody Is seeking and searching for bliss. It is really the search for immortality. All the religions are nothing but Groping for something deathless Because unless the deathless is found Man remains in misery. There is no other way, there is no other remedy.
In these five thousand years men have found everything that he thought may be helpful But nothing seems to help. Now science has provided everything: Better health, longer life Better roads, better houses, better technology Gadgets, everything -- but man remains In the same anguish as he was in the jungles No difference at all; in fact today Man is more miserable than he was ever before For the simple reason that before there was hope. Now even that hope is gone. Now we know, even science cannot help.
Just three hundred years before People were very excited: Darwin and others were very excited Because they were thinking, 'Now, we are just very close to find the secret.' Even in the beginning of this century Scientists were so full of hope and optimism That the goal is very close by, Just be the corner -- we have already arrived, Now every misery will end. And we have found many secrets of ;matter And man is in a far more mess Than he was ever before.
Now it is for the first time That man can turn inwards But very few individuals: A Jesus, a Buddha, a Zarathustra Because it needed great intelligence to see That all that is outside is futile. But now even those Who are not that much intelligent They can see the point, that all is futile. You can have the biggest house You can have a palace You can have all the money and still, You don't have anything: Death is there, continuously following you. It will snatch away everything It will crush you any moment. You are not protected, you are not secure. You can have the insurance policy but That makes no sense. Nothing is secure, nothing is safe Hence there is a trembling inside.
It is only through meditation That this trembling disappears because One come to know something That nothing can destroy, no fire can burn it. That is your innermost being That is you, you reality -- Call it the soul, the self, god. To know it is to know bliss, is to know peace To know it to enter Into a world of celebration. The same energies that were becoming anxieties Start turning into dance.
(To Joe) -- This is your name: Swami Anand Dhyanam. Anand means bliss. Dhyanam means meditation.
Bliss is the goal of life, Knowingly, unknowingly Consciously, unconsciously We are all searching for bliss. Not only human, beings: animals, birds Trees, even rocks -- The whole existence is a search for bliss. But only man is conscious enough To penetrate into that ultimate mystery. But not all man either Because very few people are really conscious. The majority lives like a robots.
Meditation is a process of transforming Your mechanicalness into consciousness. Changing your robotlike existence into awareness. Meditation can be defined As a scientific method of de-automatisation Otherwise we have all become automatic. We function like machines: Push a button here Push a button there and things go. Sometimes you run out of gas Sometimes buttons get mixed up Sometimes wires are loose Then we call a man is mad; Then we have to send him to the workshop -- We call it the hospital or the mental asylum, We have to give him electric shocks. That is just to shake him with the hope that Maybe just shaking him may put his wires right. It is hooping for the best And expecting the worse because It is just accidental; Sometimes it happens: A good shock may put your things right Sometimes it may not work. It is all depending on one approach: The whole modern psychology Ninety per cent of it is rooted in the idea That man is also a machine. Even Darwin will be shocked. At least he used to think that Man has come out of the monkeys. Even he will be shocked Because Skinner and Pavlov don't think That man is that great; He is just another kind of machine, So are the monkey!
Meditation is the only way To give you an experience, a glimpse that You are not a machine That you are something more, far more. And the moment the first glimpse happens The first window opens The first fresh breeze comes in, Your life becomes blissful. You feel for the first time to be really born. That's the whole function of sannyas: a rebirth.
(To Ulrike) -- This is your name: Ma Anand Karuna. Anand means bliss. Karuna means compassion.
There are two kinds of compassion possible. One is concerned with the misery of the other person: you feel compassionate because the other is miserable; it is other-oriented. The other kind of compassion is: you feel compassionate because you are full of bliss; it has no reference with the other. It is self-oriented.
The first kind of compassion is called service. That's what Christian missionaries go on doing. In fact it is ugly. Although it serves a certain purpose but deep down it is based on an ugly idea: you are exploiting the other person's misery. In fact, if nobody is miserable in the world, one wonders: what Christian missionaries will do then? They will be at a loss! They will be really in great misery because there will be nothing to do, no way to reach to paradise, the whole ladder is taken away.
In the East we have developed the second kind of compassion which is authentic compassion. It has nothing to do with the other's misery; it has something to do with your bliss. You are so full of bliss that you want to share it. It does not matter whether the other is miserable or not, it has no relationship with others' misery. You are not exploiting the other's misery for your own spiritual ends. You are not using the other as a means; it is not service, it is sharing.
And my effort here is to help you get rid of the idea of service and to shift your whole consciousness towards sharing: share your joy, your love, your bliss, but don't feel that you are serving the other, because that creates a subtle ego. You start feeling holier-than-thou, you start feeling you are doing a great service to humanity, that you are attaining some virtue, that your heaven is becoming guaranteed -- and that is all nonsense! The very ego is going to prevent you, the very ego will drown you!
The man of real compassion is not a man of service. He is a man, certainly of great sharing, but he has no idea that he is doing something good for you. He does not even expect any thankfulness from you. On the contrary, he feels thankful to you that you accepted his joy, that you accepted his love, that you are generous enough to allow him to share his compassion.
This second kind of compassion is true spirituality, but it has no idea of being spiritual at all. And that is the meaning of your name; let it become the meaning of your life too: be a blissful compassion.
(To Dorothea) -- This is your name: Ma Anand Chandrika Anand means bliss. Chandrika means moonlight.
Bliss is not like the sun It is more like the moonlight; It is cool and soothing. The sun is hot, the sun is fire The moon is not fire, the moon is a miracle; It receives the sun rays And transforms them into coolness. The moon represents the whole process of alchemy.
We are born with the sun energy -- That is our sexuality It is sun energy, it is fire And unless it passes through meditation It remains fire. Meditation functions like the moon: Once the sun energy passes Through the meditative process Slowly slowly its whole nature is transformed: It becomes cool, soothing, it becomes a beauty.
You cannot stare at the sun directly -- It will burn your eyes. But you can stare at the moon -- It will cure your eyes It will give you more insight.
It is not an accident That many enlightened people Became enlightened on the full-moon night. On the full-moon night It is not only the ocean that is affected; Deep down something in man's consciousness Is also affected. If you cannot contain it, you can go mad. That's why many people go mad On the full-moon night Hence in all the languages of the world Words like 'lunatic' exist. Lunatic means struck by the moon.
The madman is called lunatic -- Not sunstruck but moonstruck. He was not able to contain He was not meditative enough He missed the point, otherwise He may have moved into a new dimension. The breakdown may have proved a breakthrough; He may have become enlightened Bu he became simply mad Because the meditative bridge was missing. Many more people commit suicide On the full-moon night, remember Than on any other night: The moon Has immense impact on human consciousness but It can be destructive if there is no meditation.
But if meditation is there, If you know how to be silent If you know how to absorb its energy If you know how to be in tune with it If you know how to be without thoughts, Then madness becomes enlightenment Then suicide becomes sannyas. Certainly you die but You are immediately reborn on a far higher plane.
My sannyas is simple in a way. My whole emphasis is on meditation. Because it is the only science To transform your sun energies into moon energies To transform your heart energy into cool energies To transform the lower into the higher To transform the base metal into gold.
Osho's Commentary
(To Oliver) -- This is your name: Swami Anand Oliver.
Anand means bliss. Oliver means a peaceful heart.
It is easy to be blissful without being peaceful
It is also easy to be peaceful
Without being blissful.
The problem and the challenge is
To be both together.
And unless one is both together
One remains half, incomplete.
When both are together,
Merging, melting into each other
That it is absolutely impossible
Even to demarcate which is which,
Then only a person is total,
Then only one is whole
And to be whole is to be holy.
Because it was easy to be peaceful
Many religions chose it, just to be peaceful
Hence the escapist tendency for centuries
Has prevailed in religions:
Escape from the world because
If you are in the world the peace is disturbed
There are thousand and one
Causes for disturbance; it is better
To go to the mountains, to the monasteries
Disappear behind the walls of a monastery
Avoid all provocations, temptations
And remain peaceful.
Slowly slowly it becomes a habit
But that peace it cold,
It is almost like death.
Hence if you go to an old monastery
You will find people like corpses, utterly cold;
Peaceful, but no joy, no dance, no song.
It is the peace of the cemetery
It is a kind a suicide: Escape is suicide.
Life is in the world and real peace
Has to happen in the world, not outside it.
Few schools of mystics
Have chosen the other part, to be blissful.
For example, Sufis: they live in the world
In fact it is very difficult
To find out who is a Sufi because
They live in the world in the ordinary way.
The only thing that can create suspicion in you
That something is special about them
It their blissfulness; they are always
In a kind of ecstasy, a certain excitement
Something is happening inside them.
But because it is not peaceful
That excitement creates a state of fever
It becomes to hot, they become almost mad.
Hence only in Sufis
There is a certain state of mystics called
The mad ones, the mastas.
It can't happen in a Catholic monastery
It can't happen in the life of a Jaina monk
It can't happen to a Buddhist,
It can happen only to a Sufi:
He can go mad because he becomes to excited
And there is nothing to hold him back.
The excitement reaches to such an extreme
That it is maddening!
He is very alive, but it is not a state of health
Something is berserk about it
Something is crazy about it.
He looks drugged, stoned.
My effort here is to bring a synthesis:
One should be blissful and peaceful together.
Then the peace will prevent any kind of madness
And the bliss will prevent any kind of death.
The peace will keep you cool
And the bliss will keep you warm.
And when you are cool and warm together
There is tremendous beauty
Your life is silent
Yet there is a song in that silence.
To me that is the ultimate goal of sannyas.
(To Eldine) -- This is your name: Ma Anand Amrita.
Anand means bliss. Amrita means nectar.
The experience of bliss
Is the experience of immortality;
They are not two things, they are not separate.
They are not separable.
Once you have tasted bliss
You have also tasted the deathless in you.
Bliss is possible only
When you reach to the very center of your being
And that center is beyond death, beyond birth.
It does not exist in time
It does not exist in space either,
It is beyond both.
It is non-temporal, non spatial
It is eternity itself; in other words:
It is godliness, it is divineness.
Man's whole neurosis consists of fear.
Fear of death
Is the root cause of all other fears,
Other fears are just branches.
But if you go to the root of any fear
You will find death somewhere
Hidden behind.
Hence the mystery, the anxiety, the anguish.
Even though one has money, power, prestige
Everything -- but something is missing: one knows
All these things will go down the drain
One knows 'I am myself going down the drain
Every day, every moment.
One knows that this life is unreliable;
Tomorrow I may not be at all.'
Hence there is a shadow of death
Continuously following you
And there is no way to escape from it;
Wherever you go it is with you.
There is only one way to get rid of it
And that is to go within
Nowhere else but within.
That is the way of meditation: going inwards
Tasting your own subjectivity
Going slowly slowly out of the mind
In a state of no-mind
Where you are only conscious
And these is nothing to be conscious about;
No object remains, only pure subjectivity
Just a mirror reflecting nothing.
In that very moment, bliss explodes!
It is just like atomic explosion: you become
Full of light and full of joy and full of life
And life that knows no beginning and no end
And light that once known remains forever.
Hence I say, to know bliss is the same
As to know immortality.
That's why everybody
Is seeking and searching for bliss.
It is really the search for immortality.
All the religions are nothing but
Groping for something deathless
Because unless the deathless is found
Man remains in misery.
There is no other way, there is no other remedy.
In these five thousand years men have found
everything that he thought may be helpful
But nothing seems to help.
Now science has provided everything:
Better health, longer life
Better roads, better houses, better technology
Gadgets, everything -- but man remains
In the same anguish as he was in the jungles
No difference at all; in fact today
Man is more miserable than he was ever before
For the simple reason that before there was hope.
Now even that hope is gone.
Now we know, even science cannot help.
Just three hundred years before
People were very excited:
Darwin and others were very excited
Because they were thinking,
'Now, we are just very close to find the secret.'
Even in the beginning of this century
Scientists were so full of hope and optimism
That the goal is very close by,
Just be the corner -- we have already arrived,
Now every misery will end.
And we have found many secrets of ;matter
And man is in a far more mess
Than he was ever before.
Now it is for the first time
That man can turn inwards
But very few individuals:
A Jesus, a Buddha, a Zarathustra
Because it needed great intelligence to see
That all that is outside is futile.
But now even those
Who are not that much intelligent
They can see the point, that all is futile.
You can have the biggest house
You can have a palace
You can have all the money and still,
You don't have anything:
Death is there, continuously following you.
It will snatch away everything
It will crush you any moment.
You are not protected, you are not secure.
You can have the insurance policy but
That makes no sense.
Nothing is secure, nothing is safe
Hence there is a trembling inside.
It is only through meditation
That this trembling disappears because
One come to know something
That nothing can destroy, no fire can burn it.
That is your innermost being
That is you, you reality --
Call it the soul, the self, god.
To know it is to know bliss, is to know peace
To know it to enter
Into a world of celebration.
The same energies that were becoming anxieties
Start turning into dance.
(To Joe) -- This is your name: Swami Anand Dhyanam.
Anand means bliss. Dhyanam means meditation.
Bliss is the goal of life,
Knowingly, unknowingly
Consciously, unconsciously
We are all searching for bliss.
Not only human, beings: animals, birds
Trees, even rocks --
The whole existence is a search for bliss.
But only man is conscious enough
To penetrate into that ultimate mystery.
But not all man either
Because very few people are really conscious.
The majority lives like a robots.
Meditation is a process of transforming
Your mechanicalness into consciousness.
Changing your robotlike existence into awareness.
Meditation can be defined
As a scientific method of de-automatisation
Otherwise we have all become automatic.
We function like machines: Push a button here
Push a button there and things go.
Sometimes you run out of gas
Sometimes buttons get mixed up
Sometimes wires are loose
Then we call a man is mad;
Then we have to send him to the workshop --
We call it the hospital or the mental asylum,
We have to give him electric shocks.
That is just to shake him with the hope that
Maybe just shaking him may put his wires right.
It is hooping for the best
And expecting the worse because
It is just accidental; Sometimes it happens:
A good shock may put your things right
Sometimes it may not work.
It is all depending on one approach:
The whole modern psychology
Ninety per cent of it is rooted in the idea
That man is also a machine.
Even Darwin will be shocked.
At least he used to think that
Man has come out of the monkeys.
Even he will be shocked
Because Skinner and Pavlov don't think
That man is that great;
He is just another kind of machine,
So are the monkey!
Meditation is the only way
To give you an experience, a glimpse that
You are not a machine
That you are something more, far more.
And the moment the first glimpse happens
The first window opens
The first fresh breeze comes in,
Your life becomes blissful.
You feel for the first time to be really born.
That's the whole function of sannyas: a rebirth.
(To Ulrike) -- This is your name: Ma Anand Karuna. Anand means bliss. Karuna means compassion.
There are two kinds of compassion possible. One is concerned with the misery of the other person: you feel compassionate because the other is miserable; it is other-oriented. The other kind of compassion is: you feel compassionate because you are full of bliss; it has no reference with the other. It is self-oriented.
The first kind of compassion is called service. That's what Christian missionaries go on doing. In fact it is ugly. Although it serves a certain purpose but deep down it is based on an ugly idea: you are exploiting the other person's misery. In fact, if nobody is miserable in the world, one wonders: what Christian missionaries will do then? They will be at a loss! They will be really in great misery because there will be nothing to do, no way to reach to paradise, the whole ladder is taken away.
In the East we have developed the second kind of compassion which is authentic compassion. It has nothing to do with the other's misery; it has something to do with your bliss. You are so full of bliss that you want to share it. It does not matter whether the other is miserable or not, it has no relationship with others' misery. You are not exploiting the other's misery for your own spiritual ends. You are not using the other as a means; it is not service, it is sharing.
And my effort here is to help you get rid of the idea of service and to shift your whole consciousness towards sharing: share your joy, your love, your bliss, but don't feel that you are serving the other, because that creates a subtle ego. You start feeling holier-than-thou, you start feeling you are doing a great service to humanity, that you are attaining some virtue, that your heaven is becoming guaranteed -- and that is all nonsense! The very ego is going to prevent you, the very ego will drown you!
The man of real compassion is not a man of service. He is a man, certainly of great sharing, but he has no idea that he is doing something good for you. He does not even expect any thankfulness from you. On the contrary, he feels thankful to you that you accepted his joy, that you accepted his love, that you are generous enough to allow him to share his compassion.
This second kind of compassion is true spirituality, but it has no idea of being spiritual at all. And that is the meaning of your name; let it become the meaning of your life too: be a blissful compassion.
(To Dorothea) -- This is your name: Ma Anand Chandrika
Anand means bliss. Chandrika means moonlight.
Bliss is not like the sun
It is more like the moonlight;
It is cool and soothing.
The sun is hot, the sun is fire
The moon is not fire, the moon is a miracle;
It receives the sun rays
And transforms them into coolness.
The moon represents the whole process of alchemy.
We are born with the sun energy --
That is our sexuality
It is sun energy, it is fire
And unless it passes through meditation
It remains fire.
Meditation functions like the moon:
Once the sun energy passes
Through the meditative process
Slowly slowly its whole nature is transformed:
It becomes cool, soothing, it becomes a beauty.
You cannot stare at the sun directly --
It will burn your eyes.
But you can stare at the moon --
It will cure your eyes
It will give you more insight.
It is not an accident
That many enlightened people
Became enlightened on the full-moon night.
On the full-moon night
It is not only the ocean that is affected;
Deep down something in man's consciousness
Is also affected.
If you cannot contain it, you can go mad.
That's why many people go mad
On the full-moon night
Hence in all the languages of the world
Words like 'lunatic' exist.
Lunatic means struck by the moon.
The madman is called lunatic --
Not sunstruck but moonstruck.
He was not able to contain
He was not meditative enough
He missed the point, otherwise
He may have moved into a new dimension.
The breakdown may have proved a breakthrough;
He may have become enlightened
Bu he became simply mad
Because the meditative bridge was missing.
Many more people commit suicide
On the full-moon night, remember
Than on any other night: The moon
Has immense impact on human consciousness but
It can be destructive if there is no meditation.
But if meditation is there,
If you know how to be silent
If you know how to absorb its energy
If you know how to be in tune with it
If you know how to be without thoughts,
Then madness becomes enlightenment
Then suicide becomes sannyas.
Certainly you die but
You are immediately reborn on a far higher plane.
My sannyas is simple in a way.
My whole emphasis is on meditation.
Because it is the only science
To transform your sun energies into moon energies
To transform your heart energy into cool energies
To transform the lower into the higher
To transform the base metal into gold.