[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up.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.]
[Strength of god, and 'impulse of love' -- they are the two meanings of Astrid, Osho had told a woman several evenings ago. Using the name again as a basis for his address to another Astrid, Osho wove them together in the context not of bliss this time, but of meditation.]
Meditation is the art of slipping out of the mind. Mind is almost like a prison cell, but there is nobody preventing you from getting out, there is no guard on the gate. Except for your own fear of the unknown nothing prevents you. People are prevented only by their own fear and slowly slowly they become almost hypnotized by their fear.
In his memoirs George Gurdjieff relates that when he was a child, in his village there was a small tribe of vagabonds, wanderers, gypsies. They had a beautiful arrangement for the children. The mother would draw a circle with white chalk around the child and she would say, "You cannot get out of it" -- and that was that; the child would remain sitting there. Even if it had to be for the whole day, he would cry and weep, but he would not move out of the circle. From the very beginning he was hypnotized for that. And this hypnosis went so far that even if you drew the line around a grown-up person, he would not be able to get out of it.
Gurdjieff tried it with a few of the friends of that tribe, saying "Why don't you try to get out? What prevents you?" They tried to get out, and Gurdjieff was puzzled; it was as if they were prevented by an invisible wall; they could not get out. Nothing was there; Gurdjieff went in and out and there was no problem. They saw that if this man could go out and come in, if nothing was preventing him, then what was preventing them? It was their whole life's hypnosis.
It has become a deep-rooted idea that we are minds. For centuries we have been told that we are minds. If we are minds then there is nobody to get out and nothing to get out of; naturally, we live within the boundary of the mind -- and that is one of the most stupid ideas that has tortured the whole of humanity. Man can slip out of it. Hence meditation is really the art of de-hypnotisation.
We are hypnotized by many things. For example, when you enter a church you suddenly feel as if the place is sacred. No Mohammedan will feel that, no Hindu will feel that. When the Hindu sees a cow he feels this is something holy, divine. Nobody else in the whole world feels that the cow is divine or something sacred, but the Hindu is convinced of it. It is a far bigger sin to kill a cow than to kill a man.
Once the idea settles it goes deep into us and starts influencing our behavior. Otherwise there is nothing sacred in a church and nothing sacred in a cow and nothing sacred in a mosque or in a temple and all the statues of gods are just made of stone, just man-made things. But the greatest hypnosis is that you are the mind; then you are imprisoned.
All other hypnoses, all other conditionings, have to be destroyed, but the basic has to be destroyed first because that is the root of all. Once you know that you are awareness, not mind -- mind is just the process of thoughts, memories, desires, you are not it, you are the witness and witnessing is not part of the mind, it is transcendental -- you are suddenly out! In fact you don't slip out, you have always been out; you simply slip out of a deep-rooted hypnosis.
The moment you know you are awareness -- not because I say it, but when you experience it -- all misery drops. And then two things which are the meaning of Astrid become possible. One is strength of god -- that is one meaning of Astrid. The moment you are out of the mind you are in god, part of god. In mind you are separate from the whole; the moment you are out of the mind you are again united with the whole, the whole strength of god is yours.
And the second thing which is also a meaning of Astrid is the impulse of love; when you are one with the whole, your total energy turns into a loving flowering, a lotus of love. You become love -- that is the ultimate outcome of meditation, the fragrance of meditation. You get rooted into god and you start flowering into new flowers that you never imagined, that you never thought were possible to you.
Man contains infinities but he is completely unaware of them. To be a sannyasin means a commitment to meditation, that "I decide to get out of the mind," that "I will create the distance between me and the mind so I can know, that I am only pure consciousness." That is the greatest miracle, there is no other miracle greater than this, because after this miracle, millions of miracles happen in your life; it triggers the process of miracles.
[We've been trained to be afraid, Osho has said before tonight, or as Soren Kierkegaard put it, 'Man is a trembling.' But that's not true of everyone, Osho pointed out.]
A Buddha is not a trembling, a Jesus is not a trembling -- but Soren Kierkegaard is right about the greater mass of people. He himself was a deep trembling, he was continuously afraid. He was so afraid that he was unable to decide about even small things, essential things -- and not once but every day.
For example, he used to go from his house to the bank once every month; on the first day of the month he would go to the bank to withdraw a little money. His father had deposited money for him knowing perfectly well that he would never be able to do anything because he could not decide anything -- how could he do anything? Add he never did do anything.
Two roads used to go to the bank and he would always stand on the crossroad thinking whether he should go from this road or from that. For the whole of his life there was the same problem. He wrote a great book, EITHER/OR, and his name became famous; in the whole of Copenhagen he was known as "Either/or". Children would shout when he passed by, urchins would follow him shouting "Either/or, Either/or!" because he was always thinking whether to do this or to do that.
One woman fell in love with him but he could not decide whether to marry or not. Years passed; the woman finally decided to marry somebody else because this man was not going to decide; the whole of her life would be wasted. He was in so much fear that on the day the account in the bank was finished, the day he withdrew the last part of the money, he could not reach home. He died on the street from a heart attack, because now there was nothing left in the bank, what was going to happen?
Even if death asked him "What disease would you like to die of?", he would have never died. Death just came without asking, otherwise he would have wavered, trembled.
He says man is a trembling; he is saying something about himself and about the greater humanity. And this trembling is created by the society, it is not natural. Each child is born brave. A child can play with a snake, but we make him afraid of everything. We make him afraid of the dark, we make him afraid of animals, we make him afraid of people. We make him afraid because that is a subtle boundary that we create around him so he never goes beyond it. We impose our fear on the child; and this goes on from generation to generation -- that's why there is so much misery.
Soren Kierkegaard lived a very miserable life. Just misery and nothing else -- his whole life was one of misery. He never tasted a single moment of bliss, because bliss needs a little courage, one needs to go beyond the known, one needs to be a little adventurous, one needs to be a little courageous to gamble, one needs guts to risk. Then only do you know that thrill called bliss, otherwise no, there is no bliss. And once you have learned that bliss comes by moving into the unknown, into the insecure, then slowly slowly you start exploring the beyond.
God is another name for the beyond, for the unexplored. One can never exhaust it; hence more and more bliss goes on showering on the courageous person And once you have learned that courage and bliss are joined together, that they help each other, that the more courageous you are, the more blissful, the more blissful you are the more courageous... they go on strengthening each other, they make a tremendous peak of bliss, reaching to the very skies.
[f it's not in one of your pockets it might have fallen inside your lining -- but everything we will ever need we have been supplied with from our birth, Osho said, and went on to illustrate the point.]
I have heard about a small scout. The small boys had gone for a picnic and also for a little training. The teacher had told them what to bring and what not to bring and he discovered an umbrella in a small boy's bag. So he said "Why this umbrella? And I have told you what to bring and what not to bring." The boy started crying and he said "You know mothers. I told her that I would be in trouble because of this umbrella, but mothers are mothers: she insisted on the umbrella."
Before sending people into existence god prepares them in every way. Even things which may not be needed at all -- umbrellas -- are also given. You know how mothers are!
Everything is already given. This is the starting point of sannyas. Then the only need is to discover where it is inside our being and to help it to come to a manifested state. It is unmanifest like a seed. It is hidden -- it has to be brought to the surface. And life becomes such a splendour, such a bliss, such a beauty, that mind is not capable of comprehending it.
The whole imprisoned splendour is released and each individual becomes a miniature universe, with all the stars and all the flowers and all the mountains and all the rivers...
Just the other day I was reading an Urdu poet. He says; Flowers, stars, rivers, mountains, the spring, laughter, love, life, the green, the red and the gold of the trees, the humming of the bees, the colours of the butterflies -- -- and he goes on saying many more things -- have all been used in making my beloved; nothing is left. When I look-at my beloved, when I look into her eyes I can see mountains, Himalayas, I can see rivers, oceans, I can see clouds, I can see stars. Although she is just a small woman she contains all.
It is a truth. Through meditation you discover it within yourself, through love you start discovering it in others too. And then naturally one feels grateful towards god, then there arises a natural prayer, a thankfulness. Religion begins in that thankfulness and ends in that thankfulness.
[A social worker from Belgium, Fred's new name was Prem Yogi, Osho told him.]
Prem means love. Yogi means the path that leads to god, the path that leads to union. The word "yoga" means union and the word "yogi" means the person who is on the path of union.
Bridge, path, method, technique -- you can call it anything, but the essential th ng is love. Love is the bridge, love is the path, love is the way. It is love that gives you the insight into god, it is love that makes you capable of the reunion. And everybody is hankering for it because we have fallen apart from the whole. The part wants to merge and melt with the whole, because remaining apart from the whole is remaining starved, undernourished, uprooted.
I teach only one thing: love. Love as much as you can. The bigger your love, the greater will be your experience of god. When your love is infinite you have discovered the infinite god too. Except for love nothing helps to be united. And everybody in the world feels in some way or other that something is missing: the poor, the rich, the easterner, the westerner, the Christian, the Mohammedan, man, woman -- everybody. It is something natural, it is bound to be felt that something is missing because something is really missing.
We have lost track of our own source, we have forgotten the language to speak with the whole. But love helps you to relearn it, to remember it.
[Lilian was given a fancy name -- Amrita Anurago. The first bit means eternal, and the second, love for god, Osho said.]
And by "god" I don't mean a person, because to think of god as a person makes your love confined; not only confined, but in many ways difficult and almost impossible. It is like putting the whole sky into a small space. It is not possible. God has to be impersonal. God has to contain the whole. So the Christian god, the Jewish god, the Hindu god, won't do; they are too small. We need something vaster, more oceanic.
All the religions have created a false idea of god in people -- a very small god. And because the god is small, the religion becomes in the same way very small, mean, mediocre. And then all these religions go on fighting, almost like dogs fighting, continuously quarrelling with each other for the simple reason that their god is so small that it cannot contain the other's idea of god.
I teach vastness. The Christian god can be absorbed in it, the Hindu god can be absorbed in it, the Buddhist, the Jaina, the Jewish -- all the gods that have ever been conceived and will ever be conceived can be absorbed in it. To me god simply means infinity, vastness, the whole.
And to love the whole is a totally different affair than going to the church, than going to a temple, than doing a certain ritual, than praying or chanting or bowing down to a statue. All that becomes stupid.
Loving the whole means loving the stars and the trees and the people and the animals and the earth. In fact because all the religions have been teaching a very tiny god they have all decided to be life-negative They are afraid: if you love life too much then how will you love your god? Or only very little love will remain for god. That too is foolish. It is as if love is something quantitative -- it is not.
Love is not a quantity. It is not that if I love one person then I cannot love the other because I am finished. But this idea persists in peoples' minds; that's why people are so jealous. If somebody loves you and also loves somebody else, immediately there is a problem, great jealousy arises because you start feeling "Now, my love is divided, now I will not be getting the whole of it."
This is the beauty of love, that you can have the whole of it and others also can have the whole of it; it is not a quantity, it is a quality. And the miracle is that the more a person loves, the more he becomes capable of loving. Hence if a person loves many people he will be able to love you more, because he has been opening many dimensions to love. All those dimensions will be available to you too.
Jealousy is stupidity, it is destructive to love. But it is not only in ordinary love; the so-called religious people are also very jealous. They are afraid. I have heard about a Sufi -- I cannot believe that man has been known in Sufi literature as a master -- that he was sitting with his grandchild in his lap, just gossipping with the child, and suddenly the idea arose in him that loving the child too much meant that much love was taken away from god. He pushed the child away and he said "Get away from met"
Sufis go on repeating this story with great appreciation that he was a religious man; he saved all his love for god. That's why all the religions are against the world, against all beauty, against all poetry, against all music for the simple reason that if you get your love involved in so many places then god will not be getting the whole of it.
And they say even Jehovah in the Old Testament declared "I am a very jealous god, I cannot tolerate you loving anybody else. Your love has to be totally for me, absolute." These words are very human, they are not divine. Some priest has spoken from behind in the name of Jehovah. Or if they are Jehovah's words then Jehovah is not worth calling a god.
My approach is to love life more because god comes as life to you -- there is no other way, god never comes in any other form. All these forms are god's manifestation. Love more and love intensely and love passionately, and slowly slowly you will start discovering god in every person you love. Even if you love a rock you will discover god hidden there.
Osho's Commentary
[Strength of god, and 'impulse of love' -- they are the two meanings of Astrid, Osho had told a woman several evenings ago. Using the name again as a basis for his address to another Astrid, Osho wove them together in the context not of bliss this time, but of meditation.]
Meditation is the art of slipping out of the mind. Mind is almost like a prison cell, but there is nobody preventing you from getting out, there is no guard on the gate. Except for your own fear of the unknown nothing prevents you. People are prevented only by their own fear and slowly slowly they become almost hypnotized by their fear.
In his memoirs George Gurdjieff relates that when he was a child, in his village there was a small tribe of vagabonds, wanderers, gypsies. They had a beautiful arrangement for the children. The mother would draw a circle with white chalk around the child and she would say, "You cannot get out of it" -- and that was that; the child would remain sitting there. Even if it had to be for the whole day, he would cry and weep, but he would not move out of the circle. From the very beginning he was hypnotized for that. And this hypnosis went so far that even if you drew the line around a grown-up person, he would not be able to get out of it.
Gurdjieff tried it with a few of the friends of that tribe, saying "Why don't you try to get out? What prevents you?" They tried to get out, and Gurdjieff was puzzled; it was as if they were prevented by an invisible wall; they could not get out. Nothing was there; Gurdjieff went in and out and there was no problem. They saw that if this man could go out and come in, if nothing was preventing him, then what was preventing them? It was their whole life's hypnosis.
It has become a deep-rooted idea that we are minds. For centuries we have been told that we are minds. If we are minds then there is nobody to get out and nothing to get out of; naturally, we live within the boundary of the mind -- and that is one of the most stupid ideas that has tortured the whole of humanity. Man can slip out of it. Hence meditation is really the art of de-hypnotisation.
We are hypnotized by many things. For example, when you enter a church you suddenly feel as if the place is sacred. No Mohammedan will feel that, no Hindu will feel that. When the Hindu sees a cow he feels this is something holy, divine. Nobody else in the whole world feels that the cow is divine or something sacred, but the Hindu is convinced of it. It is a far bigger sin to kill a cow than to kill a man.
Once the idea settles it goes deep into us and starts influencing our behavior. Otherwise there is nothing sacred in a church and nothing sacred in a cow and nothing sacred in a mosque or in a temple and all the statues of gods are just made of stone, just man-made things. But the greatest hypnosis is that you are the mind; then you are imprisoned.
All other hypnoses, all other conditionings, have to be destroyed, but the basic has to be destroyed first because that is the root of all. Once you know that you are awareness, not mind -- mind is just the process of thoughts, memories, desires, you are not it, you are the witness and witnessing is not part of the mind, it is transcendental -- you are suddenly out! In fact you don't slip out, you have always been out; you simply slip out of a deep-rooted hypnosis.
The moment you know you are awareness -- not because I say it, but when you experience it -- all misery drops. And then two things which are the meaning of Astrid become possible. One is strength of god -- that is one meaning of Astrid. The moment you are out of the mind you are in god, part of god. In mind you are separate from the whole; the moment you are out of the mind you are again united with the whole, the whole strength of god is yours.
And the second thing which is also a meaning of Astrid is the impulse of love; when you are one with the whole, your total energy turns into a loving flowering, a lotus of love. You become love -- that is the ultimate outcome of meditation, the fragrance of meditation. You get rooted into god and you start flowering into new flowers that you never imagined, that you never thought were possible to you.
Man contains infinities but he is completely unaware of them. To be a sannyasin means a commitment to meditation, that "I decide to get out of the mind," that "I will create the distance between me and the mind so I can know, that I am only pure consciousness." That is the greatest miracle, there is no other miracle greater than this, because after this miracle, millions of miracles happen in your life; it triggers the process of miracles.
[We've been trained to be afraid, Osho has said before tonight, or as Soren Kierkegaard put it, 'Man is a trembling.' But that's not true of everyone, Osho pointed out.]
A Buddha is not a trembling, a Jesus is not a trembling -- but Soren Kierkegaard is right about the greater mass of people. He himself was a deep trembling, he was continuously afraid. He was so afraid that he was unable to decide about even small things, essential things -- and not once but every day.
For example, he used to go from his house to the bank once every month; on the first day of the month he would go to the bank to withdraw a little money. His father had deposited money for him knowing perfectly well that he would never be able to do anything because he could not decide anything -- how could he do anything? Add he never did do anything.
Two roads used to go to the bank and he would always stand on the crossroad thinking whether he should go from this road or from that. For the whole of his life there was the same problem. He wrote a great book, EITHER/OR, and his name became famous; in the whole of Copenhagen he was known as "Either/or". Children would shout when he passed by, urchins would follow him shouting "Either/or, Either/or!" because he was always thinking whether to do this or to do that.
One woman fell in love with him but he could not decide whether to marry or not. Years passed; the woman finally decided to marry somebody else because this man was not going to decide; the whole of her life would be wasted. He was in so much fear that on the day the account in the bank was finished, the day he withdrew the last part of the money, he could not reach home. He died on the street from a heart attack, because now there was nothing left in the bank, what was going to happen?
Even if death asked him "What disease would you like to die of?", he would have never died. Death just came without asking, otherwise he would have wavered, trembled.
He says man is a trembling; he is saying something about himself and about the greater humanity. And this trembling is created by the society, it is not natural. Each child is born brave. A child can play with a snake, but we make him afraid of everything. We make him afraid of the dark, we make him afraid of animals, we make him afraid of people. We make him afraid because that is a subtle boundary that we create around him so he never goes beyond it. We impose our fear on the child; and this goes on from generation to generation -- that's why there is so much misery.
Soren Kierkegaard lived a very miserable life. Just misery and nothing else -- his whole life was one of misery. He never tasted a single moment of bliss, because bliss needs a little courage, one needs to go beyond the known, one needs to be a little adventurous, one needs to be a little courageous to gamble, one needs guts to risk. Then only do you know that thrill called bliss, otherwise no, there is no bliss. And once you have learned that bliss comes by moving into the unknown, into the insecure, then slowly slowly you start exploring the beyond.
God is another name for the beyond, for the unexplored. One can never exhaust it; hence more and more bliss goes on showering on the courageous person And once you have learned that courage and bliss are joined together, that they help each other, that the more courageous you are, the more blissful, the more blissful you are the more courageous... they go on strengthening each other, they make a tremendous peak of bliss, reaching to the very skies.
[f it's not in one of your pockets it might have fallen inside your lining -- but everything we will ever need we have been supplied with from our birth, Osho said, and went on to illustrate the point.]
I have heard about a small scout. The small boys had gone for a picnic and also for a little training. The teacher had told them what to bring and what not to bring and he discovered an umbrella in a small boy's bag. So he said "Why this umbrella? And I have told you what to bring and what not to bring." The boy started crying and he said "You know mothers. I told her that I would be in trouble because of this umbrella, but mothers are mothers: she insisted on the umbrella."
Before sending people into existence god prepares them in every way. Even things which may not be needed at all -- umbrellas -- are also given. You know how mothers are!
Everything is already given. This is the starting point of sannyas. Then the only need is to discover where it is inside our being and to help it to come to a manifested state. It is unmanifest like a seed. It is hidden -- it has to be brought to the surface. And life becomes such a splendour, such a bliss, such a beauty, that mind is not capable of comprehending it.
The whole imprisoned splendour is released and each individual becomes a miniature universe, with all the stars and all the flowers and all the mountains and all the rivers...
Just the other day I was reading an Urdu poet. He says; Flowers, stars, rivers, mountains, the spring, laughter, love, life, the green, the red and the gold of the trees, the humming of the bees, the colours of the butterflies -- -- and he goes on saying many more things -- have all been used in making my beloved; nothing is left. When I look-at my beloved, when I look into her eyes I can see mountains, Himalayas, I can see rivers, oceans, I can see clouds, I can see stars. Although she is just a small woman she contains all.
It is a truth. Through meditation you discover it within yourself, through love you start discovering it in others too. And then naturally one feels grateful towards god, then there arises a natural prayer, a thankfulness.
Religion begins in that thankfulness and ends in that thankfulness.
[A social worker from Belgium, Fred's new name was Prem Yogi, Osho told him.]
Prem means love. Yogi means the path that leads to god, the path that leads to union. The word "yoga" means union and the word "yogi" means the person who is on the path of union.
Bridge, path, method, technique -- you can call it anything, but the essential th ng is love. Love is the bridge, love is the path, love is the way. It is love that gives you the insight into god, it is love that makes you capable of the reunion. And everybody is hankering for it because we have fallen apart from the whole. The part wants to merge and melt with the whole, because remaining apart from the whole is remaining starved, undernourished, uprooted.
I teach only one thing: love. Love as much as you can. The bigger your love, the greater will be your experience of god. When your love is infinite you have discovered the infinite god too. Except for love nothing helps to be united. And everybody in the world feels in some way or other that something is missing: the poor, the rich, the easterner, the westerner, the Christian, the Mohammedan, man, woman -- everybody. It is something natural, it is bound to be felt that something is missing because something is really missing.
We have lost track of our own source, we have forgotten the language to speak with the whole. But love helps you to relearn it, to remember it.
[Lilian was given a fancy name -- Amrita Anurago. The first bit means eternal, and the second, love for god, Osho said.]
And by "god" I don't mean a person, because to think of god as a person makes your love confined; not only confined, but in many ways difficult and almost impossible. It is like putting the whole sky into a small space. It is not possible. God has to be impersonal. God has to contain the whole. So the Christian god, the Jewish god, the Hindu god, won't do; they are too small. We need something vaster, more oceanic.
All the religions have created a false idea of god in people -- a very small god. And because the god is small, the religion becomes in the same way very small, mean, mediocre. And then all these religions go on fighting, almost like dogs fighting, continuously quarrelling with each other for the simple reason that their god is so small that it cannot contain the other's idea of god.
I teach vastness. The Christian god can be absorbed in it, the Hindu god can be absorbed in it, the Buddhist, the Jaina, the Jewish -- all the gods that have ever been conceived and will ever be conceived can be absorbed in it. To me god simply means infinity, vastness, the whole.
And to love the whole is a totally different affair than going to the church, than going to a temple, than doing a certain ritual, than praying or chanting or bowing down to a statue. All that becomes stupid.
Loving the whole means loving the stars and the trees and the people and the animals and the earth. In fact because all the religions have been teaching a very tiny god they have all decided to be life-negative They are afraid: if you love life too much then how will you love your god? Or only very little love will remain for god. That too is foolish. It is as if love is something quantitative -- it is not.
Love is not a quantity. It is not that if I love one person then I cannot love the other because I am finished. But this idea persists in peoples' minds; that's why people are so jealous. If somebody loves you and also loves somebody else, immediately there is a problem, great jealousy arises because you start feeling "Now, my love is divided, now I will not be getting the whole of it."
This is the beauty of love, that you can have the whole of it and others also can have the whole of it; it is not a quantity, it is a quality. And the miracle is that the more a person loves, the more he becomes capable of loving. Hence if a person loves many people he will be able to love you more, because he has been opening many dimensions to love. All those dimensions will be available to you too.
Jealousy is stupidity, it is destructive to love. But it is not only in ordinary love; the so-called religious people are also very jealous. They are afraid. I have heard about a Sufi -- I cannot believe that man has been known in Sufi literature as a master -- that he was sitting with his grandchild in his lap, just gossipping with the child, and suddenly the idea arose in him that loving the child too much meant that much love was taken away from god. He pushed the child away and he said "Get away from met"
Sufis go on repeating this story with great appreciation that he was a religious man; he saved all his love for god. That's why all the religions are against the world, against all beauty, against all poetry, against all music for the simple reason that if you get your love involved in so many places then god will not be getting the whole of it.
And they say even Jehovah in the Old Testament declared "I am a very jealous god, I cannot tolerate you loving anybody else. Your love has to be totally for me, absolute." These words are very human, they are not divine. Some priest has spoken from behind in the name of Jehovah. Or if they are Jehovah's words then Jehovah is not worth calling a god.
My approach is to love life more because god comes as life to you -- there is no other way, god never comes in any other form. All these forms are god's manifestation. Love more and love intensely and love passionately, and slowly slowly you will start discovering god in every person you love. Even if you love a rock you will discover god hidden there.
y