Teaching

What is the secret of how you can work on so many of us at the same time?

Because I don't work at all! I am simply there; it doesn't make any difference how many are around me. If I work, then, of course, how can I work on so many at the same time? My work is of a different quality. It is not, in fact, work. I have to use these words because of you. I am simply here; things will happen if you are also here. I am available; if you are also available, things will happen by themselves; nothing is needed to be done. A meeting is needed of two availabilities, of two presences; then things happen by themselves. What you do when you put a seed in the earth? What you do? There is just the meeting of the seed and the earth, and things happen by themselves, just like that. I am here. If you are also here... and that is the…

Osho, forgive me; I made many mistakes in understanding you. Many times doubt pursued me. Again I ask forgiveness. You have propounded many paths. May I ask what is the essential thread, the essence, of your teaching?

Dissolve! By whatever pretext you dissolve, it doesn’t matter—just dissolve! In prayer, in worship, in bhajan, in kirtan, in meditation, in satsang—dissolve. The methods are different. Someone drinks poison and kills himself. Someone shoots himself. Someone hangs himself with a rope. Someone jumps into a river. Someone lies down on the railway tracks. The methods are different, but suicide is one. In the same way, all these methods are different, but at the root there is self-annihilation. Dissolve! Let the ego come to an end. This is the real “suicide” I am teaching you. By destroying the body, nothing much is destroyed; you will come back again—and into the same kind of body, because your consciousness has not changed. It was due to a particular configuration of consciousness that you took this body. If the pattern of consciousness hasn’t changed, you will return to the same sort of body, choose…

Question: BELOVED OSHO, DO YOU THINK YOUR TEACHING IS A RADICAL ONE? Giulia, I do not have any teaching. My life is that of a rebel. I do not have a doctrine, a philosophy, a theology to teach you. I have only my own experience of rebellion to share, to infect you with rebelliousness. And when you are a rebel you will not be a copy of me; you will be an unique phenomenon in yourself. All Buddhists are trying to be carbon copies of Gautam Buddha. He has a teaching: If you follow this certain discipline, you will become just like me. All Christians are carbon copies -- the original is Jesus Christ. I don't have any teaching, any doctrine, any discipline to give to you. My whole effort is to wake you up. It is not a teaching -- it is just cold water thrown into your eyes.

Osho, is it wrong to try to save somebody? Is it not part of compassion?

That reminds me again of Natthu Kaka. I was a regular visitor to his salon. I had no beard at that time -- I was a child -- and no mustache, so there was no fear, but I had to use a scarf because I had long hair, and if Natthu Kaka was in the mood he might start cutting. And once he had cut your hair you could not do anything. And he was such a nice man, he would say, "Why be worried? -- you need not pay." It was, every day, a problem that he had shaved somebody without asking him, and now the man was angry. Particularly in India, people shave if they become sannyasins; that means they are dying in a ritualistic way. When a person dies, he is shaved; it is just symbolic. Just as when a person dies he is shaved, in the…