He’s saying saints talk in upside-down ways—like ‘the flute plays the musician’—because in deep meditation everything flips and the ego isn’t in charge.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, knowing words to be inadequate, Kabir casts them into ulatbansis—inversions. For example: “Everyone knows the sky rains and the earth gets wet. Rare is the one who understands that the earth rains and the sky gets wet.” What does it mean?
The earth returns too. The Ganges runs toward the ocean; all rivers run to the sea. What can the ocean do? It lifts them up to the sky, pours them back. Clouds form again, thicken in the sky; the earth calls; rain falls; rivers run to the sea. It is a circle, a cycle of give-and-take. There is never a moment’s break. The name of this circle is joy. Wherever it is broken, there is sorrow. Why is Kabir saying this? He is not declaring a meteorological truth. He is speaking about you. Within you too are earth and sky. Your body is your earth; your soul is your sky—the inner sky. Between them too a vast exchange should flow. But often your inner sky gives much to your bodily earth, and you fail to return. What should return to the sky gets lost in the world’s deserts; the river…
Beloved Osho, knowing the inadequacy of words, kabir uses them in an inverted sense as one may play with an inverted flute. For example: "everyone knows that the sky showers with rain and the earth soaks. But only some rare being understands that the earth showers with rain and the sky soaks." what is the meaning of this?
The ulatbansis, the Koans of Kabir are saying that the world of mathematics created by you, the expanses of logic woven by you, are all fine superficially, work in the marketplace, but never try to take them into the depths of life, they do not apply there. This is how it happens that Kabir says, "I was wonderstruck when I saw the ocean on fire!" Now, can the ocean ever catch fire? If water can catch fire, then there cannot be anything like science in the world. Water extinguishes fire, how can it catch fire? And then Kabir says, "I have seen another miracle: the fish left the ocean and climbed up a tree." Now, fishes do not climb trees. In the first place it is not possible for them to leave the ocean -- let alone tree-climbing! The fish is a creature of the water -- no legs, no…