[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up.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.]
Misery is rooted in our weakness. We are so weak, that's why we go on clinging, clinging to anything. We cannot remain without clinging for a single moment. We always need supports, props, and those supports and props keep us crippled.
Life becomes a bliss only when you are capable of dancing, when you are ready to climb the unknown peaks of consciousness, when you are courageous enough to go into the unknown, uncharted sea.
Sannyas gives this strength. The whole work of sannyas is slowly to withdraw all supports and props from you. Once all supports and props have been dropped, taken away from you, you suddenly discover your own strength. You discover the rock on which the temple of bliss can be built.
The master's work is very negative at first. It is a very thankless job. The disciple wants to escape because all that he has thought valuable is taken away and he is being thrown again and again back to his own loneliness. But unless you become capable of being absolutely alone you will never discover your innermost rock. And then there is no possibility of making a temple of bliss.
That is the second part of the master's work. First he takes away all that hinders you in discovering yourself and then he helps you to discover yourself. The second part is very easy; the first part is the most difficult part. The first part is like the elephant and the second part is just the tail of the elephant. And if the elephant has passed by, the tail cannot go on remaining behind for long. It has to follow the elephant, it is part of the elephant. ... How long will you be here? "Ten days, fifteen days."
Come back again, mm? -- otherwise I will have to bring you out tail first, and that is a very difficult thing. And if the elephant is in, he pulls his tail in again and again. A little more time is needed, so come back again.
[Osho said to the next sannyasin that meditation is like a door, a door that opens onto god.]
The moment you are open the meeting instantly happens. God is always open, the problem is with us, we are closed. The sun has risen but we are sitting with closed eyes -- what can the poor sun do? The light is showering but we are living in darkness. And it is so easy to open your eyes, no effort, it is so natural. And the moment you open your eyes all darkness disappears.
The same is true about the inner worlds god is always present, open, available, ready to fill you with love, with joy, ready to bless you, but we are closed, we are not ready to receive a closed cell with no windows, no doors. We think this is more safe and secure. This is neither safety nor security, this is death. This is living in a grave.
To me that is the meaning of the story of Lazarus coming back to life. To me it is a metaphor, a parable, poetry. It is not history, it cannot be history. I don't believe in any stupid things.
Lazarus is dead and Jesus calls him back to life -- that's the function of all the masters of all the ages. When the disciple comes to the master he is dead because he is closed, he is in a grave. The master has to call to him, Lazarus, come out of the grave. And once the disciple trusts the master he will open his doors and windows; only out of trust will he open the doors and windows. Unless he feels secure with the master he cannot open up. But once you open, the joy of opening up is such that you can compare it with the misery of living in a dark cell -- now the whole sky is yours, all the stars are yours and all the mysteries are yours.
The master is simply an instrument of god, a vehicle. God cannot speak directly to you, he has to come through somebody. Once you have heard a master calling you and you trust him enough to open your windows, the function of the master is finished. Then you will fly out of the window, then you cannot remain in the dark cell any more.
[And to remind the next sannyasin of that promise Osho gave him the name Akash -- sky!]
Mind is a very small thing, it is like a prison cell. And everybody is imprisoned in his own mind: in his prejudices, creeds, dogmas, religions, philosophies -- political and spiritual. Everybody is living in a very small dark cell. The cell is made of conditionings.
Meditation means unconditioning the mind and never allowing it to be reconditioned. Otherwise it is very easy to move from one dark cell to another dark cell.
A Hindu can become a Christian; that is very easy, there is no conversion. Instead of worshipping Krishna he starts worshipping Christ. In fact linguists say that the word 'Christ' comes from the word 'Krishna'; they are not different words, their root is the same. So you have changed from one cell to another.
A Christian can become a Hindu. He will not go to the church now, he will go to the Hindu temple. He can become a Hare Krishna follower. First he was being cheated and deceived by the priests and the bishops and the popes; now he has found new priests, new bishops, new popes. They are exotic and because they are exotic they have a certain appeal. They are so new that it seems they may have something tremendously valuable. They have nothing.
Soon one feels frustrated again, so people go on from one teacher to another, from one philosophy to another, and they are wasting their lives.
The real thing is to find a place where your mind can be unconditioned, not reconditioned, just unconditioned and left there so that you can remain innocent, in childlike innocence, so that you can remain open, so that you never enter another grave again. Then the vast sky is yours, then the whole infinity of existence is yours. Then you are no more a mortal because you are no more confined to the body and the mind. Free from the mind man becomes free from the body too -- remember it -- because mind is the source of our bondage.
The mind creates chains; once those chains are cut you are free from the body too. You can live in the body but you live as you live in a house, not as you live in a prison. You can come in freely, you can go out, you are not hindered. It is your house, you can use it; you are the master, it has to serve you.
The moment you know you are neither the mind nor the body, thousands of illusions disappear. The illusion of birth disappears immediately; you were never born, you were before birth. And simultaneously the illusion of death disappears; you will never die, you have died many times and yet you are. So birth and death happen to the body-mind mechanism, not to you. They are episodes in your eternal life, which is timeless.
This is what religion really wants to do. It does not want to create believers, slaves. It wants to create masters, people who are capable of living in freedom, people who are capable of living in God.
Meditation is like sunshine to the dark cell of the mind. It is the opening of the inner eye -- and that happens when you start practicing awareness, Osho went on.
Be aware of the body and its action. Walking, walk with alertness; don't walk like a robot, like a machine. When thinking, watch; what thoughts are moving, Just go on seeing; what desires are spinning and weaving their nets around you. Just go on watching. Go on watching how subtle dreams are moving like an undercurrent deep down in your unconscious. Watch your feelings, moods, how they suddenly arise as if from nowhere; just a moment before you were so full of joy and now you are so sad. Just watch how it happens, see the bridge ... how joy becomes sadness, how sadness becomes joy.
I am not saying to do anything. Meditation is not a doing at all, it is pure awareness. But a miracle happens, the greatest miracle in life. If you go on watching, tremendous and incredible things start happening. Your body becomes graceful, your body is no more restless, tense; your body starts becoming light, unburdened; you can see great weights, mountainous weights, falling from your body. Your body starts becoming pure of all kinds of toxins and poisons. You will see your mind is no more as active as before; its activity starts becoming less and less and gaps arise, gaps in which there are no thoughts. Those gaps are the most beautiful experiences because through those gaps you start seeing things as they are without any interference of the mind.
Slowly slowly your moods start disappearing. You are no more very joyous and no more very sad. The difference between joy and sadness starts becoming less. Soon a moment of equilibrium is reached when you are neither sad nor joyous. And that is the moment when bliss is felt. That tranquillity, that silence, that balance, is bliss.
There are no more peaks and no more valleys, no more dark nights and no more moon nights, all those polarities disappear. You start becoming settled exactly in the middle. And all these miracles go on becoming deeper and deeper, and ultimately when your body is in total balance, your mind is absolutely silent and your heart is no more full of desires, a quantum leap happens in you suddenly you become aware of the fourth -- of which you have never been aware before. And that is you, the fourth. You can call it the soul, the self, god or whatsoever you want to call it, that is up to you; any name will do because it has no name of its own.
Lao Tzu says "Because it has no name I have chosen to call it tao." You can choose anything -- X Y Z, but to attain it is the ultimate goal of life. And in that moment all is light -- your inner eye has opened. It is only through that inner eye and that light that one becomes aware of the truth of existence, and that truth liberates.
Expanding on the subject of awareness Osho said that a man who hasn't meditated isn't really alive; all he does is vegetate.
He is a cabbage, or, if you don't like the word "cabbage", you can call him a cauliflower. A cauliflower is a cabbage with college education, but basically it is the same. Educated, uneducated, cultured, uncultured, civilised, uncivilised -- it is the same. A cabbage after all is a cabbage. It may be a M.A. or a Ph.D. or a D.Lit. -- it doesn't matter. Only with meditation do you start transcending your cabbage-like life. You start living for the first time, your life energies are released.
Everybody is born with those energies, but they are like a seed, a potential and very few people up to now have been able to actualise that potential. And the people who have actualised it have always actualised it through the same process. Jesus or Buddha, Zarathustra or Lao Tzu, Krishna or Mahavira, Mohammed or Kabira -- they have followed the same process with different names.
Jesus called it "becoming aware"; he used the word "beware" -- that simply means be aware. It is a word made of two words "be", "aware". Buddha called it right mindfulness. Kabira called it surati, remembrance, remembering who you are. Gurdjieff called it self -- remembering -- it is the same. Krishnamurti calls it, choiceless awareness. This is a difference of words but they all indicate towards the same moon; different fingers pointing to the same moon.
I call it meditation. Become aware and you will know the taste of real life. And to know the of real life is to know god because there is no god other th an life.
Where the traditional religions have always regarded gold as being just dirt, Osho sees dust as being simply divine, because everything is a form or a facet of god, he told us.
I am not in search of another world, something that is beyond death; my effort is to transform this moment now and here into paradise. I am not for postponement. All those people who have been saying "If you are virtuous after death you will be rewarded," are being deceptive because who knows what happens after death? Nobody comes back to tell us. These people who are telling us have not known anything. They are just repeating like parrots.
I say to my sannyasins never postpone -- postponement is a very subtle trick of the mind. Live the moment in its totality. Always remember this is the only moment yon have got, there is no other moment, there is no other world. This world is god, there is no other god.
Once this vision settles in you it transforms your whole life. Then small things are so beautiful Then the mundane is sacred, then the ordinary is suddenly extraordinary.
[East is East and West is West, but the twain can meet. That's what his work is about, Osho concluded tonight.]
Dhyan Prachi: Meditation of the East.
The West has evolved great science but it has lost track of its own inner subjectivity; it has become too focussed on the objective world.
Science means being concerned with the object. Religion means being concerned with the subject, subjectivity. The East has developed great methodologies to bring a dawn into your inner world. It is not accidental that in the East we have chosen all kinds of shades of the color red for sannyas -- because when the sun is rising the whole of the east becomes red, and all kinds of shades of red. Clouds become red, it is red all over -- that is the beginning of the morning. The color red represents the beginning of an inner revolution. And the way we can help the inner sun rise is meditation.
The West has lived a very unconscious life, so much so that it has started denying that there is any inner world, that there is any God; matter is all. Matter is not all. I don't deny matter and I don't deny science. They have their utility, but they are not all. Life is far more. If it is only matter, it is meaningless. Unless there is a possibility of consciousness there can be no celebration in life, no real growth, no radical transformation.
By becoming a sannyasin you are getting initiated into the Eastern way of looking at things. And my effort here is to create a synthesis between East and West. Western science has to be used -- without it humanity suffers, starves, but even more important than that is the inner starvation.
The East is suffering from an outer starvation -- the body is starved. And the West is suffering from another kind of starvation which is far deeper -- the soul is starved. As I look, I see the whole world hungry: in one way or other everybody is starving.
This is a very strange world that we have created. When everybody can be fully contented, both outwardly and inwardly, there is no reason. So I am not saying choose East against West. I am saying that East and West have to dissolve into each other, they have to forget their distinctions. The West has to contribute all its technology and science to the East, and the East has to contribute all its religious insight to the West. Then only will we be able to create the whole man on earth.
My sannyasin has to herald that whole man. It has not yet existed on the earth, but without it now there is no longer any future for man. It is now absolutely essential that the whole man arrives. And with that will start a totally new era, with that the whole past history will become primitive, prehistory. The real history will begin with the whole man coming on earth.
So we are engaged in a tremendously significant experiment. Much depends on its success; in fact, the whole future of humanity and the earth depends on it. So contribute whatsoever you can contribute to that great future. And each sannyasin, knowingly or unknowingly, is preparing a ground for the real man to arrive. But you can prepare the ground only by yourself becoming real and whole.
Osho's Commentary
Misery is rooted in our weakness. We are so weak, that's why we go on clinging, clinging to anything. We cannot remain without clinging for a single moment. We always need supports, props, and those supports and props keep us crippled.
Life becomes a bliss only when you are capable of dancing, when you are ready to climb the unknown peaks of consciousness, when you are courageous enough to go into the unknown, uncharted sea.
Sannyas gives this strength. The whole work of sannyas is slowly to withdraw all supports and props from you. Once all supports and props have been dropped, taken away from you, you suddenly discover your own strength. You discover the rock on which the temple of bliss can be built.
The master's work is very negative at first. It is a very thankless job. The disciple wants to escape because all that he has thought valuable is taken away and he is being thrown again and again back to his own loneliness. But unless you become capable of being absolutely alone you will never discover your innermost rock. And then there is no possibility of making a temple of bliss.
That is the second part of the master's work. First he takes away all that hinders you in discovering yourself and then he helps you to discover yourself. The second part is very easy; the first part is the most difficult part. The first part is like the elephant and the second part is just the tail of the elephant. And if the elephant has passed by, the tail cannot go on remaining behind for long. It has to follow the elephant, it is part of the elephant.
... How long will you be here?
"Ten days, fifteen days."
Come back again, mm? -- otherwise I will have to bring you out tail first, and that is a very difficult thing. And if the elephant is in, he pulls his tail in again and again. A little more time is needed, so come back again.
[Osho said to the next sannyasin that meditation is like a door, a door that opens onto god.]
The moment you are open the meeting instantly happens. God is always open, the problem is with us, we are closed. The sun has risen but we are sitting with closed eyes -- what can the poor sun do? The light is showering but we are living in darkness. And it is so easy to open your eyes, no effort, it is so natural. And the moment you open your eyes all darkness disappears.
The same is true about the inner worlds god is always present, open, available, ready to fill you with love, with joy, ready to bless you, but we are closed, we are not ready to receive a closed cell with no windows, no doors. We think this is more safe and secure. This is neither safety nor security, this is death. This is living in a grave.
To me that is the meaning of the story of Lazarus coming back to life. To me it is a metaphor, a parable, poetry. It is not history, it cannot be history. I don't believe in any stupid things.
Lazarus is dead and Jesus calls him back to life -- that's the function of all the masters of all the ages. When the disciple comes to the master he is dead because he is closed, he is in a grave. The master has to call to him, Lazarus, come out of the grave. And once the disciple trusts the master he will open his doors and windows; only out of trust will he open the doors and windows. Unless he feels secure with the master he cannot open up. But once you open, the joy of opening up is such that you can compare it with the misery of living in a dark cell -- now the whole sky is yours, all the stars are yours and all the mysteries are yours.
The master is simply an instrument of god, a vehicle. God cannot speak directly to you, he has to come through somebody. Once you have heard a master calling you and you trust him enough to open your windows, the function of the master is finished. Then you will fly out of the window, then you cannot remain in the dark cell any more.
[And to remind the next sannyasin of that promise Osho gave him the name Akash -- sky!]
Mind is a very small thing, it is like a prison cell. And everybody is imprisoned in his own mind: in his prejudices, creeds, dogmas, religions, philosophies -- political and spiritual. Everybody is living in a very small dark cell. The cell is made of conditionings.
Meditation means unconditioning the mind and never allowing it to be reconditioned. Otherwise it is very easy to move from one dark cell to another dark cell.
A Hindu can become a Christian; that is very easy, there is no conversion. Instead of worshipping Krishna he starts worshipping Christ. In fact linguists say that the word 'Christ' comes from the word 'Krishna'; they are not different words, their root is the same. So you have changed from one cell to another.
A Christian can become a Hindu. He will not go to the church now, he will go to the Hindu temple. He can become a Hare Krishna follower. First he was being cheated and deceived by the priests and the bishops and the popes; now he has found new priests, new bishops, new popes. They are exotic and because they are exotic they have a certain appeal. They are so new that it seems they may have something tremendously valuable. They have nothing.
Soon one feels frustrated again, so people go on from one teacher to another, from one philosophy to another, and they are wasting their lives.
The real thing is to find a place where your mind can be unconditioned, not reconditioned, just unconditioned and left there so that you can remain innocent, in childlike innocence, so that you can remain open, so that you never enter another grave again. Then the vast sky is yours, then the whole infinity of existence is yours. Then you are no more a mortal because you are no more confined to the body and the mind. Free from the mind man becomes free from the body too -- remember it -- because mind is the source of our bondage.
The mind creates chains; once those chains are cut you are free from the body too. You can live in the body but you live as you live in a house, not as you live in a prison. You can come in freely, you can go out, you are not hindered. It is your house, you can use it; you are the master, it has to serve you.
The moment you know you are neither the mind nor the body, thousands of illusions disappear. The illusion of birth disappears immediately; you were never born, you were before birth. And simultaneously the illusion of death disappears; you will never die, you have died many times and yet you are. So birth and death happen to the body-mind mechanism, not to you. They are episodes in your eternal life, which is timeless.
This is what religion really wants to do. It does not want to create believers, slaves. It wants to create masters, people who are capable of living in freedom, people who are capable of living in God.
Meditation is like sunshine to the dark cell of the mind. It is the opening of the inner eye -- and that happens when you start practicing awareness, Osho went on.
Be aware of the body and its action. Walking, walk with alertness; don't walk like a robot, like a machine. When thinking, watch; what thoughts are moving, Just go on seeing; what desires are spinning and weaving their nets around you. Just go on watching. Go on watching how subtle dreams are moving like an undercurrent deep down in your unconscious. Watch your feelings, moods, how they suddenly arise as if from nowhere; just a moment before you were so full of joy and now you are so sad. Just watch how it happens, see the bridge ... how joy becomes sadness, how sadness becomes joy.
I am not saying to do anything. Meditation is not a doing at all, it is pure awareness. But a miracle happens, the greatest miracle in life. If you go on watching, tremendous and incredible things start happening. Your body becomes graceful, your body is no more restless, tense; your body starts becoming light, unburdened; you can see great weights, mountainous weights, falling from your body. Your body starts becoming pure of all kinds of toxins and poisons. You will see your mind is no more as active as before; its activity starts becoming less and less and gaps arise, gaps in which there are no thoughts. Those gaps are the most beautiful experiences because through those gaps you start seeing things as they are without any interference of the mind.
Slowly slowly your moods start disappearing. You are no more very joyous and no more very sad. The difference between joy and sadness starts becoming less. Soon a moment of equilibrium is reached when you are neither sad nor joyous. And that is the moment when bliss is felt. That tranquillity, that silence, that balance, is bliss.
There are no more peaks and no more valleys, no more dark nights and no more moon nights, all those polarities disappear. You start becoming settled exactly in the middle. And all these miracles go on becoming deeper and deeper, and ultimately when your body is in total balance, your mind is absolutely silent and your heart is no more full of desires, a quantum leap happens in you suddenly you become aware of the fourth -- of which you have never been aware before. And that is you, the fourth. You can call it the soul, the self, god or whatsoever you want to call it, that is up to you; any name will do because it has no name of its own.
Lao Tzu says "Because it has no name I have chosen to call it tao." You can choose anything -- X Y Z, but to attain it is the ultimate goal of life. And in that moment all is light -- your inner eye has opened. It is only through that inner eye and that light that one becomes aware of the truth of existence, and that truth liberates.
Expanding on the subject of awareness Osho said that a man who hasn't meditated isn't really alive; all he does is vegetate.
He is a cabbage, or, if you don't like the word "cabbage", you can call him a cauliflower. A cauliflower is a cabbage with college education, but basically it is the same. Educated, uneducated, cultured, uncultured, civilised, uncivilised -- it is the same. A cabbage after all is a cabbage. It may be a M.A. or a Ph.D. or a D.Lit. -- it doesn't matter. Only with meditation do you start transcending your cabbage-like life. You start living for the first time, your life energies are released.
Everybody is born with those energies, but they are like a seed, a potential and very few people up to now have been able to actualise that potential. And the people who have actualised it have always actualised it through the same process. Jesus or Buddha, Zarathustra or Lao Tzu, Krishna or Mahavira, Mohammed or Kabira -- they have followed the same process with different names.
Jesus called it "becoming aware"; he used the word "beware" -- that simply means be aware. It is a word made of two words "be", "aware". Buddha called it right mindfulness. Kabira called it surati, remembrance, remembering who you are. Gurdjieff called it self -- remembering -- it is the same. Krishnamurti calls it, choiceless awareness. This is a difference of words but they all indicate towards the same moon; different fingers pointing to the same moon.
I call it meditation. Become aware and you will know the taste of real life. And to know the of real life is to know god because there is no god other th an life.
Where the traditional religions have always regarded gold as being just dirt, Osho sees dust as being simply divine, because everything is a form or a facet of god, he told us.
I am not in search of another world, something that is beyond death; my effort is to transform this moment now and here into paradise. I am not for postponement. All those people who have been saying "If you are virtuous after death you will be rewarded," are being deceptive because who knows what happens after death? Nobody comes back to tell us. These people who are telling us have not known anything. They are just repeating like parrots.
I say to my sannyasins never postpone -- postponement is a very subtle trick of the mind. Live the moment in its totality. Always remember this is the only moment yon have got, there is no other moment, there is no other world. This world is god, there is no other god.
Once this vision settles in you it transforms your whole life. Then small things are so beautiful Then the mundane is sacred, then the ordinary is suddenly extraordinary.
[East is East and West is West, but the twain can meet. That's what his work is about, Osho concluded tonight.]
Dhyan Prachi: Meditation of the East.
The West has evolved great science but it has lost track of its own inner subjectivity; it has become too focussed on the objective world.
Science means being concerned with the object. Religion means being concerned with the subject, subjectivity. The East has developed great methodologies to bring a dawn into your inner world. It is not accidental that in the East we have chosen all kinds of shades of the color red for sannyas -- because when the sun is rising the whole of the east becomes red, and all kinds of shades of red. Clouds become red, it is red all over -- that is the beginning of the morning. The color red represents the beginning of an inner revolution. And the way we can help the inner sun rise is meditation.
The West has lived a very unconscious life, so much so that it has started denying that there is any inner world, that there is any God; matter is all. Matter is not all. I don't deny matter and I don't deny science. They have their utility, but they are not all. Life is far more. If it is only matter, it is meaningless. Unless there is a possibility of consciousness there can be no celebration in life, no real growth, no radical transformation.
By becoming a sannyasin you are getting initiated into the Eastern way of looking at things. And my effort here is to create a synthesis between East and West. Western science has to be used -- without it humanity suffers, starves, but even more important than that is the inner starvation.
The East is suffering from an outer starvation -- the body is starved. And the West is suffering from another kind of starvation which is far deeper -- the soul is starved. As I look, I see the whole world hungry: in one way or other everybody is starving.
This is a very strange world that we have created. When everybody can be fully contented, both outwardly and inwardly, there is no reason. So I am not saying choose East against West. I am saying that East and West have to dissolve into each other, they have to forget their distinctions. The West has to contribute all its technology and science to the East, and the East has to contribute all its religious insight to the West. Then only will we be able to create the whole man on earth.
My sannyasin has to herald that whole man. It has not yet existed on the earth, but without it now there is no longer any future for man. It is now absolutely essential that the whole man arrives. And with that will start a totally new era, with that the whole past history will become primitive, prehistory. The real history will begin with the whole man coming on earth.
So we are engaged in a tremendously significant experiment. Much depends on its success; in fact, the whole future of humanity and the earth depends on it. So contribute whatsoever you can contribute to that great future. And each sannyasin, knowingly or unknowingly, is preparing a ground for the real man to arrive. But you can prepare the ground only by yourself becoming real and whole.