What is the theoretical concept of being beyond enlightenment?

Beloved master, I see your enlightenment as a speaking medium between existence and all sannyasins -- based on love as the only true way to go. Beloved master, I've heard you say that you are beyond enlightenment. What, theoretically speaking, is the difference between enlightenment and beyond enlightenment?

Anand Nadeen, life is a continuous change. It knows no stop -- not even a semicolon. Enlightenment is not to get stuck somewhere. Nobody has talked about beyond enlightenment, because what is the point? People are not even enlightened. But I'm certain my people are going to be enlightened, and I have to make them aware not to get stuck. Even enlightenment has to be transcended. Even transcendence has to be transcended. One has just to go on and on. Existence is infinite, in multidimensions -- and there is no end anywhere. You can never say I have come. You are always coming closer and closer and closer, but you never come, because once you have come what will you do? Then the only way is to go back home. One has to go beyond enlightenment; otherwise you will find yourself in a very difficult situation -- stuck in a…

Question: BELOVED OSHO, WHAT IS BEYOND ENLIGHTENMENT? I am reminded.... Mulla Nasruddin had applied for a post on a ship. He was interviewed. The captain and the high officials of the ship were sitting in a room. Mulla entered. The captain asked, "If the seas are in a turmoil, winds are strong, waves are huge and mountainous, what are you going to do to save the ship? It is tossed from here to there...." Mulla Nasruddin said, "It is not much of a problem: I will just drop a huge anchor to keep the ship stable against the winds, against the waves. It is not much of a problem." The captain again said, "Suppose another mountainous wave comes and the ship is going to be drowned; what are you going to do?" He said, "Nothing -- another huge anchor.

Beloved Osho, before I came to know you, I had never heard about enlightenment. But I was searching for something. Now, after four years of living in a commune, I feel further away from reaching somewhere than ever before. I'm just grateful to be here and to feel your friendship and compassion. Is enlightenment still the goal? Is there any goal at all?

This is a troublesome question. Enlightenment has never been the goal. Its very nature prohibits making it a goal. The goal is always in the future somewhere; and enlightenment is always now and here. Enlightenment is an experience in the present. But this is one of the troubles of the mind, that it makes goals out of everything. If you love the idea of enlightenment, then immediately the mechanism of the mind makes it a goal: you have to achieve it -- and that's where you go on the wrong path. Enlightenment is a by-product of the understanding that to live in the past is foolish, because it is simply memory. But millions of people are wasting their time in memories. Millions of others are living in the future. You cannot live in the future; it is making castles in the air. To understand that past and future are both…

Meditation is going inward. And the journey is endless, endless in the sense that the door opens and goes on opening until the door itself becomes the universe. Meditation flowers, and it goes on flowering until the flowering itself becomes the cosmos. The journey is endless: it begins, but it never ends. There are no degrees of enlightenment. Once it is, it is there. It is just like jumping into an ocean of feeling. You jump, you become one with it, like a drop dropping into the ocean becomes one with it. But that doesn't mean that you have known the whole ocean. The moment is total: the moment of dropping the ego - the moment of ego elimination, the moment of egolessness - is total; it is complete. As far as you are concerned, it is perfect.

Beloved Osho, as a disciple of your mystery school, I want to ask you the following question: when I heard you say that you were beyond enlightenment now, it felt like a relaxation in my heart. That very moment a picture arose in me showing me that you are even closer to us now, and it feels to me as if I can somehow understand "beyond enlightenment" better than enlightenment itself. Can you please say something about this?

Adima, it raises a few fundamental questions. First, if you cannot understand enlightenment, how can you understand that which is beyond it? You are MISunderstanding. Your misunderstanding is that perhaps beyond enlightenment means below enlightenment. And you are feeling happy, but I cannot feel happy with your happiness. I feel sorry for it. You are feeling happy that I have come close to you. You should feel happy when you come close to me. Just think: if I say that I have dropped even "beyond enlightenment," that it was all fiction -- enlightenment, beyond enlightenment... I am just one of you who had a few imaginative, fictitious ideas -- you will feel even happier. Now there is nothing for you to worry about, nowhere to go, nothing to achieve, you are perfectly okay. Your question makes me understand why Gautam Buddha remained with enlightenment -- although he was seeing it,…