Self Assertion

Osho, you often advise us to follow two courses of action that seem to be incompatible with each other. First you tell us to be completely in the moment, without mind, to be our fear, our joy, or rage. Then you tell us to become detached from our egos, to watch what comes up within ourselves. How can we do both? Please explain.

And what I am doing here is not helping you to become great philosophers. My whole approach is anti-philosophical, anti-logical. My approach is existential. You have to experience; except experience there is no proof of what I am saying. Don't listen to my words, listen to the intervals. Don't be too much obsessed with what I say, become more and more attuned with my silence. The moments when nothing is said are far more pregnant. My message is not in the words but beyond the words. But I can understand, Lisa, your difficulty. That is the difficulty of all logical people -- and the whole world is trained for logic. Here we are doing just a totally different thing. We are trying to undo what the society, the college, the university has done to you. They have made you obsessed with language and logic. Language certainly divides things; that's why…

Osho, you have earlier said, “Live moment to moment, live in the present.” Now you are saying, “Return to the past.” What should we do?

So it is with the mind—there are ruts. The past means endless grooves. However much you understand, your intellect agrees, you make decisions, you resolve—at the moment of resolve you feel something is going to change. But not even an hour passes before your decision breaks. Then only self-condemnation is produced, nothing else. Your saints, your fakirs, your priests and pundits—most of the time they only succeed in producing self-condemnation in you, nothing else. Their words are logically correct. You cannot even say they are wrong; you have to admit they are right. In that admission you take a decision. But against what are you deciding? Inside are grooves carved since who knows when, deep tracks. Walking in them has become a habit. It is easy to walk in them. They will pull you again and again. The meaning of returning into the past is: these grooves must be erased.…

Osho, neither does surrender happen to me, nor do I have the power of resolve; I am entangled in between. You have created quite a predicament for me. As it is, I cannot even bear distance from you—what should I do? Unbidden, I prayed for the well-being of your cruelties; now my hands no longer rise, even after the act of prayer.

To abandon yourself to a river like a corpse requires a profound mastery of swimming. Only a great swimmer can truly let himself go into the stream. Because a great swimmer is free of fear. He knows: if need be, I can swim. If a difficulty arises, swimming is in my hands. The greater the swimmer, the more motionless he can leave himself; he does not even move hands and feet. “What is there to fear? My hands are with me, I am always here—if a moment comes, I will swim.” Such a moment does not haunt him. Tell one who does not know how to swim, “Jump into the river—give yourself up,” and he may jump in a moment of inspiration, in some joyous surge, excitement, intoxication—my song may seize him—and he jumps. The instant he jumps, he forgets what I said. Instantly his arms and legs will flail.…

Beloved Osho, I feel that through developing an attitude of endurance towards difficulties, I have become resigned to much of life. This resignation feels like a weight pushing against my effort to become more alive in meditation. Does this mean that I have suppressed my ego, and that I must find it again before I can really lose it?

If you are simply ignorant because you never attained to any knowledge, your ignorance cannot be wise, it cannot be wisdom -- it is simply absence of knowledge. And the hankering will be inside: How to gain more knowledge? How to gain more information? When you know too much -- you have known the scriptures, you have known the past, the tradition, you have known all that can be known -- then suddenly you become aware of the futility of it all, suddenly you become aware that this is not knowledge. This is borrowed! This is not your own existential experience, this is not what you have come to know. Others may have known it, you have simply gathered it. Your gathering is mechanical. It has not arisen out of you, it is not a growth. It is just rubbish gathered from other doors, borrowed, dead. Remember, knowing is alive…