Beyond

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

You have said that tantra teaches man to transcend both his craving for his animalistic past, and also his craving for the divine. Does it mean that divinity is part of the world, and that too has to be transcended? And what is it that goes beyond both?

You will have to understand many things. First: the nature of desire. Divinity is not what you call it. The god that you talk about is not the god of reality; it is the god of your desire. So it is not a question of whether the divine is part of the world. That is not the question. The real question is, can you desire the divine without making him part of the world? Look at it in this way. It has been said again and again that unless you leave desiring, you cannot attain to him, the ultimate. You cannot attain to the divine if you don't leave desiring. Leave desiring and you can attain to him. You have heard it many times, but I wonder whether you understand it or not. More or less, you will be misunderstanding it. Hearing this, you start desiring the divine -- and…

Beloved Osho, out on the sparkling seas of oneness, a mysterious wind fills my sails, giving direction to my journey and beckoning me onwards into unknown waters. My beloved captain, when does the unknown become the unknowable?

Milarepa, your question is very simple. The mind can be divided into two parts: the known and the unknown. The known is your knowledge; the unknown is your ignorance. And all your universities and educational systems are trying to do only one thing: to put your mind completely in the field of the known, to dispel the unknown, to dispel ignorance. Beyond the known and the unknown is what I call `the unknowable'. That is beyond mind. That is the world of the mysterious, the world of the miraculous. The moment you pass beyond mind, the unknown is left behind, the known is left behind, and you enter into the unknowable. And the unknowable is the field of true religion. You experience it, you live it, you feel it, it becomes your heartbeat, but you can never say you know it. Knowledge seems to be a much lower category. The…

Osho, yesterday you said that jealousy is included in respect. I have immense respect for you, but the jealousy inherent in it keeps poisoning it, and I feel guilt and pain. Does reverence transcend this poison-laced respect?

It needs a little explaining—it's a delicate point. Whenever you respect someone, you do so because you see in that person something you do not have. You respect because you glimpse in the other something you would also like to possess. A beggar respects an emperor because he, too, longs to be an emperor. So on the one hand he respects, and inside he also envies. Because he is not yet an emperor but wants to be. You have attained what he wants to attain. He respects you as skillful, successful: “I stand far back in the line; you have gone ahead to where I should have been.” So you are powerful, clever, intelligent, strong—he respects you. But inside a fire of jealousy also burns—if he gets the chance, he would like to be in your place and push you aside. And if the beggar gets that chance, he will…