Choices

Maneesha, you are asking: "in life one continually has to make practical decisions -- about how one will use one's time and keep energy, with whom one will keep company, what one will eat... Is there a difference between making choices, judging and discriminating?"

In ordinary life everything that you are doing is alright, but if you want to know the extraordinary livingness of your innermost core, then you will have to drop judgment, choice, discrimination. There is no need. In the inner world there is no marketplace, no shopping mall! In the inner world even you are not! Who is going to judge and what is going to be judged? Again remember Bodhidharma: Emptiness, nothing holy, no knowing. I am not speaking on Bodhidharma, I am speaking of my own vision, which coincides with that of Bodhidharma. It has been a serious evening with Joshu... You have enjoyed the silence. Now I would like to disturb your silence a little as a preparation for a greater silence. Pope the Polack is wandering through the Vatican gardens one day, when he nearly steps on a toad. "Hey!" shouts the toad. "Don't pass me by!"…

Osho, is choiceless awareness also a kind of choice? It seems to come down to a paradox.

No, choiceless awareness is not a choice. Choiceless means we do not make any choice, we do not select any option; we simply awaken. In that awakening we do not decide, “This is right, that is wrong; this should be accepted, that should be dropped.” We make no decision. We simply look, awake. In this awakened seeing there is no choice at all. And as long as there is choice, we cannot see with awareness. “Awareness with choice”—there is no such thing. Awareness, as such, is without choice. Awareness by its very nature is choiceless. So awareness can never be together with choice, because choice means bias has begun; sleep has begun. There are so many people sitting here: if I say, “Bacchu-bhai is a fine man,” then I cannot be aware in relation to Bacchu-bhai either, because my attachment has begun. Nor can I be aware in relation to…

Is there a difference between the real self and no-self

That's why I say this country thinks it is religious. It is not! It believes in things. There are two kinds of people in this country, but both believe in things. One kind is called the worldly: that kind goes on accumulating things. The other kind is called the other-worldly, spiritual, religious: he goes on renouncing things. But both are focused on things, both concentrate on thing -- one to possess, one to dispossess. But their eyes remain focused on things. I call this country one of the most materialistic countries in the world. But it is living in a great illusion, and the illusion is created because the people who renounce things appear to be religious. It is not a question of possessing things or renouncing things. A religious person is one who has started living in the world of no-things, who knows how to love, how to pray,…

I heard you say existence is non-judgmental, but our minds are full of judgments. Where do they come from? Are they also related to the idea of god?

Existence is non-judgmental. That is one of the greatest contributions of Zen to humanity: that you need not be a saint to be awakened. You can be awakened from any angle, from any dimension of life. It is almost like somebody is dreaming that he is murdering someone, and somebody else is dreaming a very sweet dream that he is serving the poor people. Somebody is dreaming that he is very virtuous, a saint, and somebody is dreaming that he is a murderer, the worst kind of criminal. Do you think the saintly dreamer will wake up sooner, and the sinner and the criminal will take a little longer time to wake up? They will both wake up exactly at the same time, by the same method. Just throw one bucket full of ice-cold water on both and they will jump out of their beds. It does not matter whether…