[NOTE: This is an unedited tape transcript of an unpublished darshan diary, which has been scanned and cleaned up.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.]
[Become like a child in the care of the cosmos. That's Osho's vision of the religious person. Tonight he spoke again on a theme recurring throughout this month: Unless you become like small children... ]
Every child in the mother's womb is blissful. Now he has nothing there -- he is not the president of the United States, he is not the richest man of the world, he possesses no palaces -- he has nothing at all but his bliss is infinite.
The psychologists say it is the bliss of the womb that haunts man his whole life: how to regain it? We have tasted something in the mother's womb and we cannot forget it. We make every effort to forget it but somehow it lingers. It has been such a deep experience it is impossible to erase it.
But it can be again attained very easily. One just has to become like a small child and one has to think of the whole universe as a mother's womb. That's what actually a religion is supposed to do: to help you to think of the universe as the mother so there is no conflict with you and the universe, so that you can trust the universe, so you know deeply that it cares about you, that you need not be worried and need not be continuously anxious, tense, that everything is taken care of. Then suddenly there is great bliss. Meditation only helps you to fall back in the womb of the universe.
[And to someone else he said:]
Misery is complex because it depends on many lies. The greatest lie is the ego. Ego is like the leading lie, the engine that pulls the whole train. And then there are many compartments following it: greed, anger, possessiveness, jealousy, hatred, and so on, so forth. The train is almost infinite. And this whole thing is false. It exists only in your mind, it has no reality in it. And all misery comes out of it.
But bliss is very simple. Once you drop this whole train and you become simple like a child who knows nothing of the ego, who has no ideas to dominate the whole world, who is not ambitious, who is absolutely contented with small things, collecting sea shells on the beach, and is so joyous and shouting with joy as if he has found diamonds -- that kind of simplicity brings bliss.
Jesus says "Unless you are like small children you will not enter into my kingdom of god." That's exactly what sannyas is, that's precisely the definition of sannyas: be simple and the whole existence is yours.
[Be childlike, but not childish, god is a presence not a person, Osho said tonight.]
Once god is thought to be a person, then the whole stupidity of all the religions follows out of necessity, as a logical consequence. Then the priest will come in and the church and the whole paraphernalia. If god is a person, then of course you can have mediators, mediums, through whom you can relate to him. If god is a person, then of course you can pray to him, persuade him to do things according to you. If god is a person, you will be afraid because if he is angry then he is going to take revenge -- and he is mighty, omnipotent.
With the idea of god as a person all kinds of exploitation becomes possible. People can be oppressed, exploited, made to fear, enslaved out of fear. But if you think of god as a quality then there is no need of a priest.
You have to grow that quality in you. It is not a question of prayer any more, but of meditation.
Prayer is addressed to god, meditation is simply a process of purification, inner purification; whether god exists or not is irrelevant. Hence religions that have believed in god as a person, have never risen to real heights. Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Judaism, are not really peaks of religious consciousness. Buddhism touched that peak; particularly in Zen it reached the highest pinnacle possible, it almost touched the impossible, because Buddhism believes not in god but in godliness. And that's my approach too. Start your journey into sannyas with the vision of god as godliness.
And your name, Susanne, is beautiful; it means a graceful white lily. The white lily has always been thought of as a symbol of grace for two reasons. The color white has a certain beauty about it. The beauty is that the color white is not a color at all but a transcendence of all colors. It is a meeting of all the colors and a transcendence. It contains all the colors, plus -- and that plus point is its grace, its beauty. Hence it has always represented purity, innocence, virtue.
And the lily flower is one of the most humble flowers, very poor but tremendously rich at the same time. It is not as rich as a rose, not as rich as a lotus. The rose and the lotus have a richness which is more on the outside and they are proud people, very proud people. Look at a rose flower, look at a lotus -- very proud, very egoistic! The lily is humble, very humble, almost afraid to come in front of you, wants to hide somewhere -- very shy.
Jesus loved the lily very much and he talked about the lily again and again. And I love his love for the lily. He said to his disciples, "Look at the lilies in the field -- even Solomon, the great king, attired in all his glorious garments, was not as beautiful as these poor flowers of lily..." because all that Solomon was, was extrovert. The lily has an inner radiance and that radiance is possible only when somebody is like a child. The lily has that quality of the child, unpretentious.
To become a flower, a lily, is to open up to the miracle of godliness. Be humble, simple, innocent -- that's what sannyas is all about -- and you will start growing something inside you which can only be called godliness, there is no other word for it, no other word can contain it. Even 'godliness' only indicates it.
[Possibly three-quarters of those taking sannyas each night are Germans. And among them is a fair percentage of Wolf and Wolfgangs and Ulrikes and Ulrichs. Tonight, to another Wolfgang, Osho spoke again of the wolf. First he talked about the difference between pleasure, happiness and bliss.]
Pleasure is of the body, the most superficial kind of bliss, very momentary, nothing of much value, just writing on the sand -- the wind will come and all will be gone.
The second thing is happiness. It is something deeper than pleasure. It is more psychological than physiological. For example, sex is pleasure, love is happiness. Love has a new dimension to it; it is more than sex. Sex may be a part of it, may not be a part of it -- it is not necessary. Love may be just pure friendship with no sexuality involved in it -- sensuous, very sensitive, but with no sexuality involved in it. Or sexuality may be a part of it, but when love is there it transforms even sexuality and its character; it gives it a psychological depth. It is a higher phenomenon than pleasure.
Animals know only pleasure, man is capable of knowing happiness -- any man, without any meditation, is capable of knowing happiness. But bliss is a still higher phenomenon, the highest. It happens only through meditation. Unless a man passes through meditation he cannot experience bliss. If sex is pleasure, love happiness, then prayer is bliss.
In love there is a possibility of something of sex hanging around; in prayer there is no possibility at all. Prayer has no sexual dimension to it. It has completely gone beyond the body and beyond the mind. Because it happens only when you have gone beyond the mind, meditation is needed. Meditation is the science of going beyond the mind.
To know bliss is to know all -- all that is valuable, all that is beautiful, all that is meaningful, all that is really significant. Without knowing bliss a man is just accidental, a driftwood, moving from one event to another event unconsciously.
Meditation makes you conscious. Your life becomes intrinsic, no more accidental; you move consciously. A certain sense of clarity arises out of consciousness. You know where you are going, you know who you are, you know from where you are coming. Everything is clear. Life is no more zizag, now it is very straight.
Jesus says the bridge to god is very narrow but very straight. Certainly it is narrow because only you can pass through it. You cannot even take a friend with you, it is so narrow; each individual has to go alone. But it is very straight, no zigzagness in it, because you are moving very consciously. Attain to bliss, only then is sannyas fulfilled.
And Wolfgang means the walk of the wolf. Germans are really strange people! (laughter) I am really surprised how they find the names! (more laughter! They find such strange names... And they must be in deep love with the wolves because so many names contain 'wolf'. Nothing is wrong with the wolf -- something is wrong with the Germans! (much laughter) The wolf is perfectly beautiful and because I love the wolf, so I have to love the Germans!
The wolf is a simple animal, very courageous, and one of the greatest quality of the wolf is its loyalty. It is absolutely committed. If the wolf loves a man he is ready to sacrifice his life. He will never hesitate, hc will never look back, he will never think twice. You can rely upon the wolf.
And of course, the walk of the wolf is also very graceful. All animals walk gracefully; only man has lost that grace. All animals, without exception -- even animals like camels who cannot walk gracefully, who are not supposed to walk gracefully, who are not meant to walk gracefully -- walk gracefully. Even centipedes with a hundred legs... Anybody can get puzzled: which leg to put down first and which to put down second, and the whole counting goes up to one hundred and by the time you reach the hundredth you may have forgotten the other legs. (laughter) But even centipedes walk very gracefully, for the simple reason that animals are total, out of their totality is their grace.
Grace is a by-product of totality. Both the animals and the Buddhas walk gracefully. Man is somewhere in between; he is no more animal and he is not yet a Buddha. He has lost something -- the totality of the animal -- and he has not yet gained the totality of a Christ or a Krishna or a Buddha, so he is a little divided, he is schizophrenic, he is in a conflict. He is always thinking of either/or, to do this or to do that. He is never decisive, and the indecisiveness brings the whole problem. When you are total there is grace. Then each small moment and each small movement is full of grace.
Be blissful and be graceful! he chuckled, then asked How long will you be here?' Three weeks, replied Wolfgang.
Come back again -- that's not like a German -- and come for a longer period, Osho said warmly.
[Meditation brings you the gift of a new life: you start living in the present, Osho told Dhyan Marie.]
... and because all your energies become concentrated in the present life becomes an intensity, a passionate love affair.
Rosa Luxemburg used to say that a man should live like a torch burning from both ends simultaneously. But that is possible only if you live in the present moment, with no past, with no future -- then you are afire. Your very energy, its intensity, is such that it turns into light.
Just as at one hundred degrees water evaporates, there is a certain intensity of inner energies where you and your ego evaporate. And when you are no more, god is, godliness is.
[A riddle: What's neither cold nor hot and is when you're not? Why? bliss! said Osho.]
We know what is cold and we know what is hot, but we don't know what is cool -- that is not our experience.
Our mind moves like a pendulum from the hot to the cold, from the cold to the hot; it never stops in the middle. If it stops in the middle it will experience something totally new, the cool.
Lust is hot, it is a state of fever, it is feverish; it is almost a state of insanity. And just at the opposite polarity is hate which is cold, utterly cold. One is feverishly hot, the other is deadly cold -- and the mind goes on moving between the two. You can love a person or you can hate the person. That's why friends can easily turn into enemies and enemies can turn into friends; there is not much difference.
Machiavelli was very much aware of the fact. In his great book, The Prince, he advises politicians "Don't say anything to a friend which you would not like to tell an enemy because the friend can become your enemy any day." And he also says "Don't say anything against the enemy which you would not like to say against a friend because the enemy can turn out to be your friend any day, then you will have to repent unnecessarily, to apologize."
Machiavelli is cunning but his insight is clear. What he is saying is true and it is our experience, everybody's experience: we move from one extreme to the other.
There are worldly people who are madly after money, power, prestige, and there are so-called monks -- the other-worldly people -- who are madly against the world. But the madness is the same, there is no difference in their madness; their insanity is the same. The object has changed -- they are no more for the world, they are against the world -- but they are the same people, they have not changed.
My whole effort here is to give you the exact point which is in the middle of the extremes. Buddha has called his path "majjhim nakaya"; majjhim nakaya means the middle way. He used to say if you are exactly in the middle you transcend the polar opposites, then you are neither in lust nor in hate. And that state of coolness where nothing disturbs you, neither love nor hate, is the state where bliss is found, god is found, truth is found.
And just as when the pendulum of the clock stops in the middle -- if you hold the pendulum in the middle the clock stops -- in exactly the same way: if you stop your mind in the middle, mind disappears and time disappears too. You suddenly enter into eternity. And that is the world of god, the world of the immortals.
[And who doesn't want to be part of that? We're all after bliss, whether we know it or not, Osho went on to say.]
Those who are not religious, they are seeking bliss; those who are atheists, they are also seeking bliss. Animals, birds, trees, all that is, is groping, trying to find something that can make life a rejoicing. Hence I call bliss the ultimate truth.
My sannyasins are not worried about god, not worried about heaven or hell, not worried about sin or virtue; their only concern is how to be more blissful. But once you are blissful many things start happening of their own accord. If you are blissful you become virtuous without any effort. A blissful person cannot harm anybody.
If you are blissful you cannot lie. A man who has reached to the ultimate truth, how can he lie for what? There is nothing for him to lie for. A man who has known truth is no more interested in ordinary worldly pursuits; he has known something higher than money can give, power can give, prestige can give. His whole life goes through a miraculous change.
Entering into sannyas is entering into that world of miracles. The secret key that opens the world of miracles is blissfulness. Be of great cheer, let your heart sing and let your body dance and let your life become more and more a celebration.
Osho's Commentary
[Become like a child in the care of the cosmos. That's Osho's vision of the religious person. Tonight he spoke again on a theme recurring throughout this month: Unless you become like small children... ]
Every child in the mother's womb is blissful. Now he has nothing there -- he is not the president of the United States, he is not the richest man of the world, he possesses no palaces -- he has nothing at all but his bliss is infinite.
The psychologists say it is the bliss of the womb that haunts man his whole life: how to regain it? We have tasted something in the mother's womb and we cannot forget it. We make every effort to forget it but somehow it lingers. It has been such a deep experience it is impossible to erase it.
But it can be again attained very easily. One just has to become like a small child and one has to think of the whole universe as a mother's womb. That's what actually a religion is supposed to do: to help you to think of the universe as the mother so there is no conflict with you and the universe, so that you can trust the universe, so you know deeply that it cares about you, that you need not be worried and need not be continuously anxious, tense, that everything is taken care of. Then suddenly there is great bliss.
Meditation only helps you to fall back in the womb of the universe.
[And to someone else he said:]
Misery is complex because it depends on many lies. The greatest lie is the ego. Ego is like the leading lie, the engine that pulls the whole train. And then there are many compartments following it: greed, anger, possessiveness, jealousy, hatred, and so on, so forth. The train is almost infinite. And this whole thing is false. It exists only in your mind, it has no reality in it. And all misery comes out of it.
But bliss is very simple. Once you drop this whole train and you become simple like a child who knows nothing of the ego, who has no ideas to dominate the whole world, who is not ambitious, who is absolutely contented with small things, collecting sea shells on the beach, and is so joyous and shouting with joy as if he has found diamonds -- that kind of simplicity brings bliss.
Jesus says "Unless you are like small children you will not enter into my kingdom of god." That's exactly what sannyas is, that's precisely the definition of sannyas: be simple and the whole existence is yours.
[Be childlike, but not childish, god is a presence not a person, Osho said tonight.]
Once god is thought to be a person, then the whole stupidity of all the religions follows out of necessity, as a logical consequence. Then the priest will come in and the church and the whole paraphernalia. If god is a person, then of course you can have mediators, mediums, through whom you can relate to him. If god is a person, then of course you can pray to him, persuade him to do things according to you. If god is a person, you will be afraid because if he is angry then he is going to take revenge -- and he is mighty, omnipotent.
With the idea of god as a person all kinds of exploitation becomes possible. People can be oppressed, exploited, made to fear, enslaved out of fear. But if you think of god as a quality then there is no need of a priest.
You have to grow that quality in you. It is not a question of prayer any more, but of meditation.
Prayer is addressed to god, meditation is simply a process of purification, inner purification; whether god exists or not is irrelevant. Hence religions that have believed in god as a person, have never risen to real heights. Christianity, Hinduism, Mohammedanism, Judaism, are not really peaks of religious consciousness. Buddhism touched that peak; particularly in Zen it reached the highest pinnacle possible, it almost touched the impossible, because Buddhism believes not in god but in godliness. And that's my approach too.
Start your journey into sannyas with the vision of god as godliness.
And your name, Susanne, is beautiful; it means a graceful white lily. The white lily has always been thought of as a symbol of grace for two reasons. The color white has a certain beauty about it. The beauty is that the color white is not a color at all but a transcendence of all colors. It is a meeting of all the colors and a transcendence. It contains all the colors, plus -- and that plus point is its grace, its beauty. Hence it has always represented purity, innocence, virtue.
And the lily flower is one of the most humble flowers, very poor but tremendously rich at the same time. It is not as rich as a rose, not as rich as a lotus. The rose and the lotus have a richness which is more on the outside and they are proud people, very proud people. Look at a rose flower, look at a lotus -- very proud, very egoistic! The lily is humble, very humble, almost afraid to come in front of you, wants to hide somewhere -- very shy.
Jesus loved the lily very much and he talked about the lily again and again. And I love his love for the lily. He said to his disciples, "Look at the lilies in the field -- even Solomon, the great king, attired in all his glorious garments, was not as beautiful as these poor flowers of lily..." because all that Solomon was, was extrovert. The lily has an inner radiance and that radiance is possible only when somebody is like a child. The lily has that quality of the child, unpretentious.
To become a flower, a lily, is to open up to the miracle of godliness. Be humble, simple, innocent -- that's what sannyas is all about -- and you will start growing something inside you which can only be called godliness, there is no other word for it, no other word can contain it. Even 'godliness' only indicates it.
[Possibly three-quarters of those taking sannyas each night are Germans. And among them is a fair percentage of Wolf and Wolfgangs and Ulrikes and Ulrichs. Tonight, to another Wolfgang, Osho spoke again of the wolf. First he talked about the difference between pleasure, happiness and bliss.]
Pleasure is of the body, the most superficial kind of bliss, very momentary, nothing of much value, just writing on the sand -- the wind will come and all will be gone.
The second thing is happiness. It is something deeper than pleasure. It is more psychological than physiological. For example, sex is pleasure, love is happiness. Love has a new dimension to it; it is more than sex. Sex may be a part of it, may not be a part of it -- it is not necessary. Love may be just pure friendship with no sexuality involved in it -- sensuous, very sensitive, but with no sexuality involved in it. Or sexuality may be a part of it, but when love is there it transforms even sexuality and its character; it gives it a psychological depth. It is a higher phenomenon than pleasure.
Animals know only pleasure, man is capable of knowing happiness -- any man, without any meditation, is capable of knowing happiness. But bliss is a still higher phenomenon, the highest. It happens only through meditation. Unless a man passes through meditation he cannot experience bliss.
If sex is pleasure, love happiness, then prayer is bliss.
In love there is a possibility of something of sex hanging around; in prayer there is no possibility at all. Prayer has no sexual dimension to it. It has completely gone beyond the body and beyond the mind. Because it happens only when you have gone beyond the mind, meditation is needed. Meditation is the science of going beyond the mind.
To know bliss is to know all -- all that is valuable, all that is beautiful, all that is meaningful, all that is really significant. Without knowing bliss a man is just accidental, a driftwood, moving from one event to another event unconsciously.
Meditation makes you conscious. Your life becomes intrinsic, no more accidental; you move consciously. A certain sense of clarity arises out of consciousness. You know where you are going, you know who you are, you know from where you are coming. Everything is clear. Life is no more zizag, now it is very straight.
Jesus says the bridge to god is very narrow but very straight. Certainly it is narrow because only you can pass through it. You cannot even take a friend with you, it is so narrow; each individual has to go alone. But it is very straight, no zigzagness in it, because you are moving very consciously.
Attain to bliss, only then is sannyas fulfilled.
And Wolfgang means the walk of the wolf. Germans are really strange people! (laughter) I am really surprised how they find the names! (more laughter! They find such strange names... And they must be in deep love with the wolves because so many names contain 'wolf'. Nothing is wrong with the wolf -- something is wrong with the Germans! (much laughter) The wolf is perfectly beautiful and because I love the wolf, so I have to love the Germans!
The wolf is a simple animal, very courageous, and one of the greatest quality of the wolf is its loyalty. It is absolutely committed. If the wolf loves a man he is ready to sacrifice his life. He will never hesitate, hc will never look back, he will never think twice. You can rely upon the wolf.
And of course, the walk of the wolf is also very graceful. All animals walk gracefully; only man has lost that grace. All animals, without exception -- even animals like camels who cannot walk gracefully, who are not supposed to walk gracefully, who are not meant to walk gracefully -- walk gracefully. Even centipedes with a hundred legs... Anybody can get puzzled: which leg to put down first and which to put down second, and the whole counting goes up to one hundred and by the time you reach the hundredth you may have forgotten the other legs. (laughter) But even centipedes walk very gracefully, for the simple reason that animals are total, out of their totality is their grace.
Grace is a by-product of totality. Both the animals and the Buddhas walk gracefully. Man is somewhere in between; he is no more animal and he is not yet a Buddha. He has lost something -- the totality of the animal -- and he has not yet gained the totality of a Christ or a Krishna or a Buddha, so he is a little divided, he is schizophrenic, he is in a conflict. He is always thinking of either/or, to do this or to do that. He is never decisive, and the indecisiveness brings the whole problem. When you are total there is grace. Then each small moment and each small movement is full of grace.
Be blissful and be graceful! he chuckled, then asked How long will you be here?'
Three weeks, replied Wolfgang.
Come back again -- that's not like a German -- and come for a longer period, Osho said warmly.
[Meditation brings you the gift of a new life: you start living in the present, Osho told Dhyan Marie.]
... and because all your energies become concentrated in the present life becomes an intensity, a passionate love affair.
Rosa Luxemburg used to say that a man should live like a torch burning from both ends simultaneously. But that is possible only if you live in the present moment, with no past, with no future -- then you are afire. Your very energy, its intensity, is such that it turns into light.
Just as at one hundred degrees water evaporates, there is a certain intensity of inner energies where you and your ego evaporate. And when you are no more, god is, godliness is.
[A riddle: What's neither cold nor hot and is when you're not? Why? bliss! said Osho.]
We know what is cold and we know what is hot, but we don't know what is cool -- that is not our experience.
Our mind moves like a pendulum from the hot to the cold, from the cold to the hot; it never stops in the middle. If it stops in the middle it will experience something totally new, the cool.
Lust is hot, it is a state of fever, it is feverish; it is almost a state of insanity. And just at the opposite polarity is hate which is cold, utterly cold. One is feverishly hot, the other is deadly cold -- and the mind goes on moving between the two. You can love a person or you can hate the person. That's why friends can easily turn into enemies and enemies can turn into friends; there is not much difference.
Machiavelli was very much aware of the fact. In his great book, The Prince, he advises politicians "Don't say anything to a friend which you would not like to tell an enemy because the friend can become your enemy any day." And he also says "Don't say anything against the enemy which you would not like to say against a friend because the enemy can turn out to be your friend any day, then you will have to repent unnecessarily, to apologize."
Machiavelli is cunning but his insight is clear. What he is saying is true and it is our experience, everybody's experience: we move from one extreme to the other.
There are worldly people who are madly after money, power, prestige, and there are so-called monks -- the other-worldly people -- who are madly against the world. But the madness is the same, there is no difference in their madness; their insanity is the same. The object has changed -- they are no more for the world, they are against the world -- but they are the same people, they have not changed.
My whole effort here is to give you the exact point which is in the middle of the extremes. Buddha has called his path "majjhim nakaya"; majjhim nakaya means the middle way. He used to say if you are exactly in the middle you transcend the polar opposites, then you are neither in lust nor in hate. And that state of coolness where nothing disturbs you, neither love nor hate, is the state where bliss is found, god is found, truth is found.
And just as when the pendulum of the clock stops in the middle -- if you hold the pendulum in the middle the clock stops -- in exactly the same way: if you stop your mind in the middle, mind disappears and time disappears too. You suddenly enter into eternity. And that is the world of god, the world of the immortals.
[And who doesn't want to be part of that? We're all after bliss, whether we know it or not, Osho went on to say.]
Those who are not religious, they are seeking bliss; those who are atheists, they are also seeking bliss. Animals, birds, trees, all that is, is groping, trying to find something that can make life a rejoicing. Hence I call bliss the ultimate truth.
My sannyasins are not worried about god, not worried about heaven or hell, not worried about sin or virtue; their only concern is how to be more blissful. But once you are blissful many things start happening of their own accord. If you are blissful you become virtuous without any effort. A blissful person cannot harm anybody.
If you are blissful you cannot lie. A man who has reached to the ultimate truth, how can he lie for what? There is nothing for him to lie for. A man who has known truth is no more interested in ordinary worldly pursuits; he has known something higher than money can give, power can give, prestige can give. His whole life goes through a miraculous change.
Entering into sannyas is entering into that world of miracles. The secret key that opens the world of miracles is blissfulness. Be of great cheer, let your heart sing and let your body dance and let your life become more and more a celebration.