How can I learn the secrets of life?

Question: OSHO, HOW CAN I LEARN THE SECRETS OF LIFE? Rabindra, THERE ARE NO SECRETS IN LIFE. Or you can say: life is an open secret. Everything is available, nothing is hidden. All that you need is just eyes to see. It is like a blind man asking: "I want to learn the secret of light." All that he needs is treatment of the eyes so that he can see. Light is available, it is not a secret. But he is blind -- for him there is no light. What to say about light? For him there is not even darkness -- because even to see darkness eyes are needed. A blind man cannot see darkness. If you can see darkness you can see light; they are two aspects of the same coin. The blind man knows nothing of darkness and nothing of light.

Osho, what is the relationship between meditation and patience?

If you sit to meditate to remove mental restlessness, you will keep looking back again and again: “Has it gone yet?” And the irony is that when you begin to meditate, restlessness will increase. Because what has been repressed will start surfacing; catharsis will begin. The rubbish you have kept hidden within and never allowed to express—meditation will break open those doors too. It will clean the house. Dust piled up for years, for births, will rise again; there will be gusts and storms. For a while even the little peace you had will be lost. Then you will panic: “I came for peace, and even what I had is gone.” Without patience, you could even become unhinged, because meditation brings such a great storm. The disease is not from a day or two; it’s from lifetimes. Meditation will break through all the layers to reach your innermost core. In…

Question: The first question: Osho, what is life? Such questions seem simple; they arise in everyone’s mind. But such questions have no answer. In fact, they are not really questions at all; therefore they have no answer. Understand this small poem. “Further?” Drowsing, someone asked, just like that. “Further on too there was a bridge, the same bridge, the very same bridge— where the blue night was blazing below, far below, on the ground, so far below that if you bend and call out, even the voice, falling to the earth, shatters to bits. The blue night was blazing there below, far below, on the ground, and noon’s mercury was there, pouring from the sky. I walked for many centuries, went on and on along the bridge, but no other end of the bridge ever appeared to me. At last I sat down, tired—just to take a single breath.

Beloved Osho, being with you I feel so blissful and liberated, and there seems to be no end to it. You must have tricked me. What is your secret?

And in fact the no seems to be more rational, more loving, more meaningful, more humane. Rather than arguing with that man, Arjuna had just to say: "I have accepted your idea that whatsoever happens, happens according to God" -- and then should have left for the Himalayas. He wanted to be a sannyasin, a meditator in the Himalayas. Krishna would not have been able to stop him -- just because of his own argument. Arjuna could have said, "If war is to happen, God will bring me back -- but you keep quiet." Hence Hindus would not like anybody else to be accepted as a prophet of God. Mohammed talks nonsense. You cannot expect anything better from an uneducated man who could not write, who could not read, who had never been in any way a meditative man. He married nine women. Now, I cannot support that, because in…

Osho, how to see what is?

Function from the state of not knowing, and it will bring you immense, ecstatic experiences, because the person who is without knowledge is capable of wondering. The person who is without knowledge is capable of awe. He can dance seeing a rose flower, he can sing because the sky is full of stars. He can be in tune with existence. Seeing a sunset, he can go into wild ecstasy -- because he knows nothing. Life is a mystery to him. Knowledge demystifies life. Because he knows nothing, everything, the most ordinary too, becomes absolutely extraordinary, luminous, because everything is mysterious. Everything Is mysterious! Your knowledge simply hides your ignorance and destroys your capacity to be mystified. Knowledge is destructive of mysticism. Hence all the mystics of all the ages have been saying one single thing: Drop knowledge -- all knowledge is rubbish. Be in a state of not knowing; function…