[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up. It is for reference purposes only.]
[The most ordinary thing in the world is to think "I am extraordinary." Drop the ego and lop off the last word; go beyond the self and you've deleted the "I" transcend even "'am" and you run smack into god. Osho spoke first tonight to Veet Alma.]
The highest peak, the ultimate experience, is that of no-self, but just a step below it is the experience of the self. The experience of the self in itself is a great growth. Very few people experience their self; they live in the ego. The ego is the lowest and the most false thing. It is a pseudo self, a pretender, a cheat, a deceiver. Millions of people never go beyond the ego.
The sannyasin has to start moving beyond the ego. First the ego has to be dropped. The idea that "I am special," that "I am extraordinary," that "I am superior," persists in everybody. The idea is of being extraordinary but in itself it is very ordinary because everybody has it. It is one of the most ordinary things, it is just like the common cold; still we go on believing in our extraordinariness.
There is an Arabic proverb that says when god makes anybody he whispers in his ear "You are the most extraordinary person I have ever made but please don't tell others -- they will not believe it." So everybody keeps it inside, nobody says it clearly, but everybody wants others to know that it is so. By political power, by money, by physical health, by beauty, by some talent -- everybody is trying to prove that which cannot be said directly but can only be hinted at indirectly; "See who I am: I am not an ordinary human being, I am extraordinary."
The sannyasin has to drop it because it is stupid. In this life everything is extraordinary; hence the question does not arise. There is nothing ordinary or extraordinary, the whole is one. The moment the ego is dropped -- the ego is synonymous with "I am -- when the I is dropped the am remains. That is the shadow of the I, a very subtle phenomenon.
I is gross. The politician has it, the rich man has it, particularly the newly-rich man has a very gross I. Those who have been rich for hundreds of years, the aristocrats, they are not so egoistic. There is no need to show their extraordinariness, everybody knows it already; hence they seem to be more humble.
Kings are more humble than their servants for the simple reason that a king need not prove his extraordinariness, it is already proved. But the servant has to prove it. And you can see, if you go to the lowest person in any hierarchy he will be the most difficult person. The higher the person in the hierarchy, the nicer he is. The highest person is almost always nice, because he need not say he is extraordinary; it is so clearly known.
But the saint has a subtle ego called the self, atma. The politician is gross, the saint is subtle. He has no I but great am-ness: of spirituality, of austerity, of simplicity, of humbleness, even of egolessness there is a subtle shadow left...
The sannyasin has to transcend that too. Then comes the moment when there is neither I nor am. One is -- very transparent, very silent. There is no turmoil of "I am", no noise; everything has stopped. In that ultimate state of no-self, anatta, one comes to know god. That state is god.
It is better to move from the ego to the soul. And many religions have stopped there; only one religion, the religion created by Gautam the Buddha, has not stopped there, otherwise all other religions have stopped at the second step. It seems to be the end. What more is there? You have dropped the ego, you have become humble, a servant of god -- the journey is over!
Gautam Buddha's contribution to the world is that he said the journey is not over, now the real journey starts. To drop the ego was not much, it was ordinary. Now you have something so subtle and so delicate, so non-substantial, that it can be dropped only through tremendous intelligence. Hence he is the first man in the history of humanity to declare anatta, no-self. And that's why he was misunderstood in India and his religion completely uprooted from the country -- because this country has believed in atma, the soul, for thousands of years. He was against the whole tradition but he broke into new ground.
And there is nothing more beyond it. When you have come to no-self you have come to the ultimate boundary of things. One evaporates and disappears. But in that disappearance is the appearance of god. The moment you are not, god is.
[The meaning of his name, Wolfango, gave Osho another opportunity to speak about the grace that animals are endowed with and which man has lost sight of.]
Wild animals really have grace because they have never been to any school, college or university. Their parents have not imposed any rules of behaviour on them. They don't have priests and politicians; they don't belong to any culture, to any civilisation, to any church. Because of all this they have a natural grace.
Man's natural grace is destroyed. We start imposing patterns on it; it becomes patterned and limited. Man is the most unnatural animal on the earth, and all his misery arises because of his unnaturalness. If one wants to be blissful one has to be natural. That's the meaning of your name: be as natural as a wolf. Drop all that has been imposed upon you, drop all the conditionings, don't be a Christian, a Hindu, a Mohammedan, don't be Indian, German, Italian -- just be! Just be as a child when he is born. He knows nothing about Italy, Germany, France; he is utterly innocent of all this nonsense.
"The sannyasin has to attain to that innocence again, he has to become a child. But this second childhood is of immense importance. The first childhood is bound to disappear one day, sooner or later; the second childhood is your achievement. Through the second childhood one becomes sacred, holy. To me that is resurrection. And then there is great grace and great bliss and great love. And all that is valuable starts flowing through you naturally, spontaneously.
[Man has lost innocence -- and his ability to celebrate, Osho continued the sorry story.]
Man has become a spectator, somehow he has become only an observer. He does not participate in the celebration. That is because of the mind. The mind is an observer, a spectator, it avoids participation. It would like to see a movie on love but it would not like to fall in love itself because that is dangerous. It would love to read a book like SIDDHARTHA or THE PROPHET, but it would not like to become Siddhartha -- that is dangerous. It always keeps aloof. It wants to see everything on the TV screen -- there is no danger.
Meditation means participation in the celebration of existence. Don't be just a spectator, participate in the mystery of life. Dance it, sing it, feel it, be it -- that's he message in your name.
[Again tonight Osho imbued the words 'love' and 'bliss' with fresh insight in his address to a student from Germany.]
Bliss is subjective; it is of your inner world, it is your interiority. As you move inwards you become more and more blissful. When you reach to the very centre of your being bliss is perfect, without any flaw, nothing is missing. One is utterly contented.
Love is extroversion, a journey towards the other. Bliss is a journey towards oneself; love is a journey towards the other, it is a dialogue. Bliss happens in aloneness, love happens in togetherness. And both are essential because we are both. We have these two aspects of our life, the interior and the exterior.
As you move towards the other in deeper intimacy love starts moving to new heights, to new depths. When you have reached the very innermost core of the other person, love is perfect, without any flaw. The perfect man is one who can reach both centres, who can touch the very being of the other and who can touch his own being. Then he has both wings. And they are big, wide wings. There is no journey which is impossible for him: he can go to the ultimate, then the whole sky is his.
[He talked about those who have tried to live just one aspect, bliss -- the monks and nuns who tried to renounce the world. Then there are those who have tried to live the other aspect: relationship is all.]
That is the whole standpoint of the most important school of psychology, the behaviourists. They say man is nothing but his behaviour, man is how he behaves. There is no interiority at all in man according to them, there is nothing inside; all is his behaviour and the behaviour can be programmed.
So man is only a machine. You can programme the machine. He has a memory system -- you can feed certain things into the memory system, just as you do to a computer. And that's what educationists have been doing for centuries: programming people, programming them for a certain behaviour.
That too has not succeeded because a man who knows only how to relate -- maybe he knows the right way to relate -- is still half because he does not know who he is. He knows much more about the other than about himself. It is very lopsided, and then there are many complexities because of this halfness.
The monk suffers because he has no love, he is afraid of love. And love is a healing energy, it is nourishment, it gives warmth, it is life. Aloneness is beautiful, but if it is cold then it is dead. If it is full of love then it is full of flowers, then it is a garden. Then birds are singing and bees are humming and there is great life.
The monk suffers from lack of love and becomes cold, as cold as his cold cell in the Himalayas, icy cold. He loses all compassion -- because compassion is part of love.
Many people from the West are puzzled when they come to the East: for thousands of years the East has been religious, there have been so many great religious people -- how have they tolerated so much starvation, misery, illness? How? There are so many beggars and nobody takes any note of it, nobody is disturbed.
The reason is that the East has been trying to live one half, the cold aloneness. It is not concerned, it has no compassion, it has no love, it does not bother about the other. The whole eastern approach makes you selfish, unconcerned about the other's misery. It gives you the right kind of explanations and rationalisations which can satisfy you logically, intellectually, that this is the right way.
It says everybody is suffering his own karma. If he is a beggar he is a beggar because of his past lives -- you cannot help, you cannot do anything about it. In fact doing anything will be a kind of interference in the smooth movement of a particular direction that he has been taking for lives together. Don't interfere, leave him alone; be alone and leave him alone If somebody is poor it is because of past lives, karma. Nothing can be done about its everything has to be as it is.
No revolution has ever happened in the East. The very idea is alien, it is not acceptable to the East. Things are always as they are and they will always remain as they are. The East says there is nothing new under the sun and nothing can ever be new.
The West has also suffered because of the other problem. If you are loving but you don't know how to be alone, you will be tired of love because you will not know how to rest in yourself. That's why in the West marriage has become a very superficial phenomenon. People are tired, very soon tired of each other. Three years is the average limit in America. If a marriage lasts more than three years it is a miracle, it is something extraordinary.
The average is three years; if you are an average person then within three years you have to change your house, your job, your wife, your husband. And those who are a little further advanced, they do it more quickly: every year just as they change the model of their car, they change the model of their woman. And new models are always coming -- why go on in a T-model Ford? The whole problem is that love is there but there is no inner centering.
The East and the West, the worldly and the other-worldly -- both have suffered.
My emphasis is that one should grow both wings together. And they can be grown, not only can they be grown, they enhance each other. The more blissful you become, the more loving, because only a blissful person can be loving. And the more loving you are, the more blissful you become, because only a loving person can be blissful.
This old dichotomy between love and bliss has to be destroyed. That has to be the work of my sannyasins: all over the world we have to destroy this duality and we have to create a new kind of humanity in which love and bliss are in deep harmony, enhancing, enriching each other. is the perfect man possible. And the perfect man is needed very much.
[A feud or a fugue... yes, love can be music, Osho told Prem Sangit.]
Love is a state of harmony, accord, attunement, at-onement; it is music. Just as a musician plays on his instrument, two lovers play on each other's hearts and slowly a harmony arises between the two and it goes on reaching to higher peaks. There is no limit, even the sky is not the limit. There cannot be any limit to love; it is infinite in all directions. It is the most mysterious phenomenon in life, but music comes closest to it, music is its very heartbeat. In fact scientists say that music was discovered through the heartbeat.
Whenever you listen to music, if it goes with your heartbeat you will feel very blessed, you will feel very heavenly. But if it goes against your heartbeat then you will feel nauseous. And the same is true about love: love can be a nausea, it can be a sickness unto death.
If two persons are continuously quarrelling, fighting, nagging, are continuously at each other's necks, if they don't know anything amore about love than fighting, as if it is a kind of wrestling, then it creates nausea -- and the worst kind of nausea. It destroys your life, your joy, your enthusiasm. All great qualities in you -- adventure, courage, meaning -- they all start disappearing. You start becoming settled in a very mundane life. You start thinking that this is all, there is no more to it, nothing more is possible.
But when love is really music, a harmony, it gives you a longing for more, it gives you desires to reach to higher peaks. As it becomes deeper and profounder, you become aware in a vague way that there are higher peaks still. And there is no limit really: whenever you reach a high peak, you will see another, higher peak -- just there, waiting for you, calling you, challenging you. And the ultimate peak of love is god.
Osho's Commentary
[The most ordinary thing in the world is to think "I am extraordinary." Drop the ego and lop off the last word; go beyond the self and you've deleted the "I" transcend even "'am" and you run smack into god. Osho spoke first tonight to Veet Alma.]
The highest peak, the ultimate experience, is that of no-self, but just a step below it is the experience of the self. The experience of the self in itself is a great growth. Very few people experience their self; they live in the ego. The ego is the lowest and the most false thing. It is a pseudo self, a pretender, a cheat, a deceiver. Millions of people never go beyond the ego.
The sannyasin has to start moving beyond the ego. First the ego has to be dropped. The idea that "I am special," that "I am extraordinary," that "I am superior," persists in everybody. The idea is of being extraordinary but in itself it is very ordinary because everybody has it. It is one of the most ordinary things, it is just like the common cold; still we go on believing in our extraordinariness.
There is an Arabic proverb that says when god makes anybody he whispers in his ear "You are the most extraordinary person I have ever made but please don't tell others -- they will not believe it." So everybody keeps it inside, nobody says it clearly, but everybody wants others to know that it is so. By political power, by money, by physical health, by beauty, by some talent -- everybody is trying to prove that which cannot be said directly but can only be hinted at indirectly; "See who I am: I am not an ordinary human being, I am extraordinary."
The sannyasin has to drop it because it is stupid. In this life everything is extraordinary; hence the question does not arise. There is nothing ordinary or extraordinary, the whole is one. The moment the ego is dropped -- the ego is synonymous with "I am -- when the I is dropped the am remains. That is the shadow of the I, a very subtle phenomenon.
I is gross. The politician has it, the rich man has it, particularly the newly-rich man has a very gross I. Those who have been rich for hundreds of years, the aristocrats, they are not so egoistic. There is no need to show their extraordinariness, everybody knows it already; hence they seem to be more humble.
Kings are more humble than their servants for the simple reason that a king need not prove his extraordinariness, it is already proved. But the servant has to prove it. And you can see, if you go to the lowest person in any hierarchy he will be the most difficult person. The higher the person in the hierarchy, the nicer he is. The highest person is almost always nice, because he need not say he is extraordinary; it is so clearly known.
But the saint has a subtle ego called the self, atma. The politician is gross, the saint is subtle. He has no I but great am-ness: of spirituality, of austerity, of simplicity, of humbleness, even of egolessness there is a subtle shadow left...
The sannyasin has to transcend that too. Then comes the moment when there is neither I nor am. One is -- very transparent, very silent. There is no turmoil of "I am", no noise; everything has stopped. In that ultimate state of no-self, anatta, one comes to know god. That state is god.
It is better to move from the ego to the soul. And many religions have stopped there; only one religion, the religion created by Gautam the Buddha, has not stopped there, otherwise all other religions have stopped at the second step. It seems to be the end. What more is there? You have dropped the ego, you have become humble, a servant of god -- the journey is over!
Gautam Buddha's contribution to the world is that he said the journey is not over, now the real journey starts. To drop the ego was not much, it was ordinary. Now you have something so subtle and so delicate, so non-substantial, that it can be dropped only through tremendous intelligence. Hence he is the first man in the history of humanity to declare anatta, no-self. And that's why he was misunderstood in India and his religion completely uprooted from the country -- because this country has believed in atma, the soul, for thousands of years. He was against the whole tradition but he broke into new ground.
And there is nothing more beyond it. When you have come to no-self you have come to the ultimate boundary of things. One evaporates and disappears. But in that disappearance is the appearance of god. The moment you are not, god is.
[The meaning of his name, Wolfango, gave Osho another opportunity to speak about the grace that animals are endowed with and which man has lost sight of.]
Wild animals really have grace because they have never been to any school, college or university. Their parents have not imposed any rules of behaviour on them. They don't have priests and politicians; they don't belong to any culture, to any civilisation, to any church. Because of all this they have a natural grace.
Man's natural grace is destroyed. We start imposing patterns on it; it becomes patterned and limited. Man is the most unnatural animal on the earth, and all his misery arises because of his unnaturalness. If one wants to be blissful one has to be natural. That's the meaning of your name: be as natural as a wolf. Drop all that has been imposed upon you, drop all the conditionings, don't be a Christian, a Hindu, a Mohammedan, don't be Indian, German, Italian -- just be! Just be as a child when he is born. He knows nothing about Italy, Germany, France; he is utterly innocent of all this nonsense.
"The sannyasin has to attain to that innocence again, he has to become a child. But this second childhood is of immense importance. The first childhood is bound to disappear one day, sooner or later; the second childhood is your achievement. Through the second childhood one becomes sacred, holy. To me that is resurrection. And then there is great grace and great bliss and great love. And all that is valuable starts flowing through you naturally, spontaneously.
[Man has lost innocence -- and his ability to celebrate, Osho continued the sorry story.]
Man has become a spectator, somehow he has become only an observer. He does not participate in the celebration. That is because of the mind. The mind is an observer, a spectator, it avoids participation. It would like to see a movie on love but it would not like to fall in love itself because that is dangerous. It would love to read a book like SIDDHARTHA or THE PROPHET, but it would not like to become Siddhartha -- that is dangerous. It always keeps aloof. It wants to see everything on the TV screen -- there is no danger.
Meditation means participation in the celebration of existence. Don't be just a spectator, participate in the mystery of life. Dance it, sing it, feel it, be it -- that's he message in your name.
[Again tonight Osho imbued the words 'love' and 'bliss' with fresh insight in his address to a student from Germany.]
Bliss is subjective; it is of your inner world, it is your interiority. As you move inwards you become more and more blissful. When you reach to the very centre of your being bliss is perfect, without any flaw, nothing is missing. One is utterly contented.
Love is extroversion, a journey towards the other. Bliss is a journey towards oneself; love is a journey towards the other, it is a dialogue. Bliss happens in aloneness, love happens in togetherness. And both are essential because we are both. We have these two aspects of our life, the interior and the exterior.
As you move towards the other in deeper intimacy love starts moving to new heights, to new depths. When you have reached the very innermost core of the other person, love is perfect, without any flaw. The perfect man is one who can reach both centres, who can touch the very being of the other and who can touch his own being. Then he has both wings. And they are big, wide wings. There is no journey which is impossible for him: he can go to the ultimate, then the whole sky is his.
[He talked about those who have tried to live just one aspect, bliss -- the monks and nuns who tried to renounce the world. Then there are those who have tried to live the other aspect: relationship is all.]
That is the whole standpoint of the most important school of psychology, the behaviourists. They say man is nothing but his behaviour, man is how he behaves. There is no interiority at all in man according to them, there is nothing inside; all is his behaviour and the behaviour can be programmed.
So man is only a machine. You can programme the machine. He has a memory system -- you can feed certain things into the memory system, just as you do to a computer. And that's what educationists have been doing for centuries: programming people, programming them for a certain behaviour.
That too has not succeeded because a man who knows only how to relate -- maybe he knows the right way to relate -- is still half because he does not know who he is. He knows much more about the other than about himself. It is very lopsided, and then there are many complexities because of this halfness.
The monk suffers because he has no love, he is afraid of love. And love is a healing energy, it is nourishment, it gives warmth, it is life. Aloneness is beautiful, but if it is cold then it is dead. If it is full of love then it is full of flowers, then it is a garden. Then birds are singing and bees are humming and there is great life.
The monk suffers from lack of love and becomes cold, as cold as his cold cell in the Himalayas, icy cold. He loses all compassion -- because compassion is part of love.
Many people from the West are puzzled when they come to the East: for thousands of years the East has been religious, there have been so many great religious people -- how have they tolerated so much starvation, misery, illness? How? There are so many beggars and nobody takes any note of it, nobody is disturbed.
The reason is that the East has been trying to live one half, the cold aloneness. It is not concerned, it has no compassion, it has no love, it does not bother about the other. The whole eastern approach makes you selfish, unconcerned about the other's misery. It gives you the right kind of explanations and rationalisations which can satisfy you logically, intellectually, that this is the right way.
It says everybody is suffering his own karma. If he is a beggar he is a beggar because of his past lives -- you cannot help, you cannot do anything about it. In fact doing anything will be a kind of interference in the smooth movement of a particular direction that he has been taking for lives together. Don't interfere, leave him alone; be alone and leave him alone If somebody is poor it is because of past lives, karma. Nothing can be done about its everything has to be as it is.
No revolution has ever happened in the East. The very idea is alien, it is not acceptable to the East. Things are always as they are and they will always remain as they are. The East says there is nothing new under the sun and nothing can ever be new.
The West has also suffered because of the other problem. If you are loving but you don't know how to be alone, you will be tired of love because you will not know how to rest in yourself. That's why in the West marriage has become a very superficial phenomenon. People are tired, very soon tired of each other. Three years is the average limit in America. If a marriage lasts more than three years it is a miracle, it is something extraordinary.
The average is three years; if you are an average person then within three years you have to change your house, your job, your wife, your husband. And those who are a little further advanced, they do it more quickly: every year just as they change the model of their car, they change the model of their woman. And new models are always coming -- why go on in a T-model Ford? The whole problem is that love is there but there is no inner centering.
The East and the West, the worldly and the other-worldly -- both have suffered.
My emphasis is that one should grow both wings together. And they can be grown, not only can they be grown, they enhance each other. The more blissful you become, the more loving, because only a blissful person can be loving. And the more loving you are, the more blissful you become, because only a loving person can be blissful.
This old dichotomy between love and bliss has to be destroyed. That has to be the work of my sannyasins: all over the world we have to destroy this duality and we have to create a new kind of humanity in which love and bliss are in deep harmony, enhancing, enriching each other. is the perfect man possible. And the perfect man is needed very much.
[A feud or a fugue... yes, love can be music, Osho told Prem Sangit.]
Love is a state of harmony, accord, attunement, at-onement; it is music. Just as a musician plays on his instrument, two lovers play on each other's hearts and slowly a harmony arises between the two and it goes on reaching to higher peaks. There is no limit, even the sky is not the limit. There cannot be any limit to love; it is infinite in all directions. It is the most mysterious phenomenon in life, but music comes closest to it, music is its very heartbeat. In fact scientists say that music was discovered through the heartbeat.
Whenever you listen to music, if it goes with your heartbeat you will feel very blessed, you will feel very heavenly. But if it goes against your heartbeat then you will feel nauseous. And the same is true about love: love can be a nausea, it can be a sickness unto death.
If two persons are continuously quarrelling, fighting, nagging, are continuously at each other's necks, if they don't know anything amore about love than fighting, as if it is a kind of wrestling, then it creates nausea -- and the worst kind of nausea. It destroys your life, your joy, your enthusiasm. All great qualities in you -- adventure, courage, meaning -- they all start disappearing. You start becoming settled in a very mundane life. You start thinking that this is all, there is no more to it, nothing more is possible.
But when love is really music, a harmony, it gives you a longing for more, it gives you desires to reach to higher peaks. As it becomes deeper and profounder, you become aware in a vague way that there are higher peaks still. And there is no limit really: whenever you reach a high peak, you will see another, higher peak -- just there, waiting for you, calling you, challenging you. And the ultimate peak of love is god.