Osho : The Bhagwan Rajnish: December 2009

OSHO
Never Born - Never Died
Only Visited this
Planet Earth between
December 11, 1931 - January 19, 1990

Osho is a visionary enlightened mystic of the new age. He spoke on a vast range of subjects including the talks of many mystics of the past and revived their teachings that are transcribed and published in over 650 books and are translated in many languages. He shared the essence of different meditation techniques and paths leading to inner transformation and developed His unique dynamic meditation methods that help the modern man unburden his anxieties and stress through a deep cleansing process in order to achieve a relaxed state of meditation and ultimately - Enlightenment. His basic message is the synthesis of the material and spiritual worlds, the culmination into Zorba the Buddha, a life full of YES and Celebration! Following are some of the highlights in a chronological manner.

December 11,1931: Osho is born in Kuchwada, a small village in the state of Madhya Pradesh, central India. He is the eldest of eleven children of a Jaina cloth merchant. Stories of His early years describe Him as independent and rebellious as a child, questioning all social, religious and philosophical beliefs. As a youth He experiments with meditation techniques.

March 21, 1953: Osho becomes enlightened at the age of twenty-one, while majoring in philosophy at D.N. Jain college in Jabalpur. In the East, enlightenment is described as a state of ultimate and total consciousness or awareness, as attained by Gautama Buddha, Socrates, and others. Western concepts of "enlightened" connoting "modern" and "the Enlightenment," indicating 18th century European intellectual ferment are only linguistically similar.

1956: Osho receives His M.A. from the University of Sagar with First Class Honors in Philosophy. He is the All-India Debating Champion and Gold Medal winner in His graduating class.

1957-1968: University Professor and Public Speaker.

1957: Osho is appointed as a professor at the Sanskrit College in Raipur.

1958: He is appointed Professor of Philosophy at the University of Jabalpur, where He taught until 1966. A powerful and passionate debater, He also travels widely in India, speaking to large audiences and challenging orthodox religious leaders in public debates.

Late 1960's: His Hindi talks become available in English translations.

1966: After nine years of teaching, He leaves the university to devote Himself entirely to the raising of human consciousness. on a regular basis, He begins to address gatherings 20,000 to 50,000 in the open-air maidans of India's major cities. Four times a year He conducts intense ten-day meditation camps.

1970: In July, 1970, He moves to Bombay, where He lives until 1974.

In 1970, the 14th of April, He introduces His revolutionary meditation technique, dynamic Meditation, which begins with a period of uninhibited movement and catharsis, followed by a period of silence and stillness. Since then this meditation technique has been used by psychotherapists, medical doctors, teachers and other professionals around the world.

Osho - at this time called Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh - begins to initiate seekers into Neo-Sannyas or discipleship, a path of commitment to self-exploration and meditation which does not involve renouncing the world or anything else. Osho's understanding of 'renunciation' is a radical departure from the traditional Eastern viewpoint. For Him it is not the material world that needs to be renounced but our past and the conditionings and belief systems that each generation imposes on the next. He continues to conduct meditation camps at Mount Abu in Rajasthan but stops accepting invitations to speak throughout the country. He devotes his energies entirely to the rapidly expanding group of sannyasins around Him.

At this time, the first Westerners begin to arrive and to be initiated into Neo-Sannyas. Among them are leading psychotherapists from the human potential movement in Europe and America, seeking the next step in their own inner growth. With Osho they experience new, original meditation techniques for contemporary man, synthesizing the wisdom of the East with the science of the West.

1974 - 1981: During these seven years He gives a 90 minutes discourse nearly every morning, alternating every month between Hindi and English. His discourses offer insights into all the major spiritual paths, including Yoga, Zen, Taoism, Tantra and Sufism. He also speaks on Gautam Buddha, Jesus, Lao Tzu, and other mystics. These discourses have been collected into over 300 volumes and translated into 20 languages.

In the evenings, during these years, He answers questions on personal matters such as love, jealousy, meditation. These 'darshans' are compiled in 64 darshan diaries of which 40 are published.

The commune that arose around Osho at this time offers a wide variety of therapy groups which combine Eastern meditation techniques with Western psychotherapy. Therapists from all over the world are attracted and by 1980 the international community gained a reputation as ' the world's finest growth and therapy center." One hundred thousand people pass through its gates each year.

1981: He develops a degenerative back condition. In March 1981, after giving daily discourses for nearly 15 years, Osho begins a three-year period of self-imposed public silence. In view of the possible need for emergency surgery, and on the recommendation of His personal doctors, He travels to the U.S.

This same year, His American disciples purchase a 64,000-acre ranch in Oregon and invite Him to visit. He eventually agrees to stay in the U.S. and allows an application for permanent residence to be filed on His behalf.

A model agricultural commune rises from the ruins of the central Oregonian high desert. Thousands of overgrazed and economically unviable acres are reclaimed. The city of Rajneeshpuram is incorporated and eventually provides services to 5,000 residents. Annual summer festivals are held which draw 15,000 visitors from all over the world. Very quickly, Rajneeshpuram becomes the largest and most controversial spiritual community ever pioneered in America.

Opposition to the commune and new city keeps pace with its success. Responding to the anti-cult fervor which pervades all levels of American society during the Reagan years, local, state and federal politicians make inflammatory speeches against the Rajneeshees. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), the Treasury Department, and the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Agency (ATF) are only a few of the agencies spending millions of dollars in taxpayers' money while harassing the commune with unwarranted and fruitless investigations. Similar costly campaigns are conducted in Oregon.

October 1984: Osho ends three and one half years of self-imposed silence, and begins speaking to small groups of people who gather at His residence.

July 1985: He resumes His public discourses each morning to thousands of seekers gathered in a two-acre meditation hall.

Sept. - Oct. 1985: The Oregon Commune is Destroyed.

September 14, 1985: Osho's personal secretary and several members of the commune's management suddenly leave, and a whole pattern of illegal acts they have committed - including poisoning, arson, wiretapping, and attempted murder - are exposed. Osho invites law enforcement officials to investigate Sheela's crimes. The authorities, however, see the investigation as a golden opportunity to destroy the commune entirely.

October 23, 1985: A U.S. federal grand jury in Portland secretly indicts Osho and 7 others on relatively minor charges of immigration fraud.

October 28, 1985: Without warrants, federal and local officials arrest at gun point Osho and others in Charlotte, North Carolina. While the others are released, He is held without bail for twelve days. A five-hour return plane trip to Oregon takes four days. En route, Osho is held incommunicado and forced to register under the pseudonym, David Washington, in the Oklahoma County jail. Subsequent events indicate that it is probable that He was poisoned with the heavy metal thallium while in that jail and the El Reno Federal Penitentiary.

November 1985: Emotions and publicity swell around Osho's immigration case. Fearing for His life and the well-being of sannyasins in volatile Oregon, attorneys agree to an Alford Plea on two out of 35 of the original charges against Him. According to the rules of the plea, the defendant maintains innocence while saying that the prosecution could have convicted him. Osho and His attorneys maintain His innocence in the court. He is fined $400,000 and is deported from America.

Among others, U.S. Attorney in Portland, Charles Turner, publicly concedes that the government was intent on destroying Rajneeshpuram.

December 1985: The Indian government attempts to isolate Him by canceling the visas issued to his personal household staff.

January-February 1986: He travels to Kathmandu, Nepal and speaks twice daily for the next two months. In February, the Nepalese government refuses visas for His visitors and closest attendants. He leaves Nepal and embarks on a world tour.

February-March 1986: At His first stop, Greece, he is granted a 30-day tourist visa. But after only 18 days, on March 5, Greek police forcibly break into the house where He is staying, arrest Him at gun point, and deport him. Greek media reports indicate government and church pressure provoked the police intervention.

During the following two weeks He visits or asks permission to visit 17 countries in Europe and the Americas. All of these countries either refuse to grant Him a visitor's visa or revoke His visa upon His arrival, and force Him to leave. Some refuse even landing permission for His plane.

March-June 1986: On March 19 He travels to Uruguay. On May 14th the government has scheduled a press conference to announce that He will be granted permanent residence in Uruguay. Uruguay's President Sanguinetti later admits that he received a telephone call from Washington, D.C. the night before the press conference. He is told that if Osho is allowed to stay in Uruguay, the six billion dollar debt Uruguay owes to the U.S. will be due immediately and no further loans will be granted. Osho is ordered to leave Uruguay on June 18th.

June-July 1986: During the next month He is deported from both Jamaica and Portugal. In all, 21 countries had denied Him entry or deported Him after arrival. On July 29,1986, He returns to Bombay, India.

January 1987: He returns to the ashram in Poona, India, which is renamed Rajneeshdham. The Indian government resumes its policy of denying visas to known friends of Osho.

July 1988: Osho begins, for the first time in 14 years, to personally lead the meditation at the end of each evening's discourse. He also introduces a revolutionary new meditation technique called The Mystic Rose.

January-February 1989: He stops using the name "Bhagwan," retaining only the name Rajneesh. However, His disciples ask to call Him 'Osho' and He accepts this form of address. Osho explains that His name is derived from William James' word 'oceanic' which means dissolving into the ocean. Oceanic describes the experience, He says, but what about the experiencer? For that we use the word 'Osho.' Later, He came to find out that 'Osho' has also been used historically in the Far East, meaning "The Blessed One, on Whom the Sky Showers Flowers."

March-June 1989: Osho is resting to recover from the effects of the poisoning, which by now are strongly influencing His health.

July 1989: His health is getting better and He makes two appearances for silent darshans during the Festival, now renamed Osho Full Moon Celebration.

August 1989: Osho begins to make daily appearances in Gautama the Buddha Auditorium for evening darshan. He sits in silence while music is played, explaining: "That which cannot be said has to be experienced. This is a great experience of getting into an inner, meditative space." He also inaugurates a special group of white-robed sannyasins called the "Osho White Robe Brotherhood." All sannyasins and non-sannyasins attending the evening darshans are asked to wear white robes. Osho has said that "There is a mystical gathering of energy in these robes; day by day, they gather more potential."

On the second weekend of every month, three-day meditation camps are held, using the unique meditation techniques devised by Osho. All participants are asked to wear maroon robes. In a further development, Osho suggests that sannyasins working in the ashram should also wear maroon, so in the day the commune is filled with maroon-robed people and in the evening with white-robed people.

September 1989: Osho drops the name "Rajneesh," signifying His complete discontinuity from the past. He is known simply as "Osho," and the ashram is renamed "Osho Commune International."

January 1990: During the second week in January, Osho's body becomes noticeably weaker. On January 18, He is so physically weak that He is unable to come to Gautama the Buddha Auditorium. On January 19, His pulse becomes irregular. When His doctor inquires whether they should prepare for cardiac resuscitation, Osho says, "No, just let me go. Existence decides its timing." He leaves His body at 5 p.m. At 7 p.m. His body is brought to Gautama the Buddha Auditorium for a celebration, and is then carried to the burning ghats for cremation. Two days later, His ashes are brought to Osho Commune International and placed in His samadhi in Chuang Tzu Auditorium. In the days that follow, thousands of sannyasins and lovers fly in from around the world to celebrate and absorb the atmosphere of love and meditation that is the fragrance of Osho.

Just before His departure from the body, Osho says: "Never speak of me in the past tense. My presence here will be many times greater without the burden of my tortured body. Remind my people that they will feel much more-they will know immediately." Osho also talks about how He wants the expansion of the work to continue. He says that now that he is leaving His body, many more people would come, many more people's interest would show, and His work would expand incredibly beyond our ideas. Then He says: "I leave you my dream."

In 1980, in answer to the question, "What happens when you leave your body?" Osho replies, "I will be dissolved in my people. Just as you can taste the sea from any place and it is salty, you will be able to taste any of my sannyasins and you will find the same taste: the taste of the Blessed One.... I am preparing my people to live joyously, ecstatically. So when I am not in my body, it won't make any difference to them. They will still live the same way - and maybe my death will bring them more intensity."

In 1989 He responded to a similar question from Italian TV, saying, "I believe and trust absolutely in existence. If there is any truth in what I am saying, it will survive. The people who remain interested in my work will be simply carrying the torch, but not imposing anything on anyone, either by sword or bread. I will remain a source of inspiration to my people and that is what most sannyasins will feel. I want them to grow on their own. Qualities like love, around which no church can be created, like awareness, qualities which are nobody's monopoly, like celebration, rejoicing, and maintaining childlike fresh eyes. I want people to know themselves not to be according to someone else, and the way is in."

Friday, December 18, 2009

Some Fact About Sex

You are obsessed with sex because you don’t know any other sort of celebration. So the problem is not sex really; the problem is that you don’t know any other celebration. Nature allows you only one joy, and that is of sex. Nature allows you only one enjoyment, that is of sex. Nature allows you only one thrill, and that is of sex.
In the sexual act you have a certain thrill, a moment of forgetfulness, a moment of oblivion. You feel good — for a few seconds, only for a few seconds, you drop out of this routine world. Sex gives you a door to escape into some other world — which is non-tense; there is no worry; you are simply relaxed and melting. But have you observed? After each sexual act you feel frustrated.
Sex creates neurosis, it is neurotic, because it can never satisfy you. Now, go to the madhouses of the world and just watch the mad people, and you will always find that somewhere or other there is a sexual problem. That’s what Freud says, that ALL pathology is somehow connected with sex. Too much sex obsession becomes neurotic. If you live in the body, you are bound to become neurotic. You have to go a little deeper and higher than the body.
Whenever a person starts condemning sex, somewhere he must be carrying a jealousy. Buddha is not condemning. He is simply factual. He simply says whatsoever is the case. And he wants you to come out of it because your destiny is bigger, higher is the potentiality.
Animals have sex but no sexuality. Man has sex plus sexuality. Sex is physical, sexuality is mental — and when you talk, your talk can be sexual. Animals have sex; that’s a physiological act. They don’t talk, they don’t have any language; but man has language, and language is one of the most powerful instruments in the hands of man. You communicate through it, you relate through it. You seduce through words, you insult through words; you show your love through words, you show your hate through words. You repel or attract through your words.
In sex there may be relaxation. In sex there may be physiological health and hygiene. But there is no growth. You remain animal. With love you become human. With love you become upright. With love you stand erect on earth. With sex you are again animal, you are horizontal on the earth, just moving like other animals, crawling. With love you are erect, vertical.
Real awareness always leads you beyond sex, and celibacy happens on its own accord. Because to be in sex you have either to be identified with the male or identified with the female. A real celibate is one who has gone beyond, who is neither.
Repression can never bring freedom. Repression makes you a slave. Repress anything, and that will become your master. So the so-called celibates in the monasteries — the BRAHMACHARIS — they are continuously obsessed with sex. Their whole obsession is sex, their mind is completely sexual — it has to be so. Or, if you are mad, and you are REALLY against the body and you start destroying the body, the only thing that you can succeed in will be that you will become a eunuch.
Love goes beyond polarity, sex remains below polarity. Sex needs the opposite, love does not need the opposite. Hence, in sex there is always a subtle conflict, because with the opposite the harmony can never be total. For moments maybe… again the conflict comes in.
Love is unconditional, sex is conditional. In sex there is a give and take. In love, you simply pour. You don’t ask, there is no demand. Not that you don’t get — you get a thousandfold — but that is not asked for. That simply comes on its own accord: the whole existence showers back, echoes back.
Now, one thing to be remembered always: if you are not very alert you may go on believing that you are moving into tantra, and you may be simply rationalizing your sexuality — it may be nothing but sex, rationalized in the terminology of tantra. If you move into sex with awareness, it can turn into tantra. If you move into tantra with unawareness, it can fall and become ordinary sex. It has happened in India — because only India has tried it.
Sex energy is just at the source of the spine. If a child is taught from the very beginning to be against sex…. Sex is sin, and sex has to be destroyed, or at least controlled — never allowed to go too far, never allowed to be spontaneous; has to be put under many controls, laws, regulations. These laws, regulations, suppressions, they become the buffer: the kundabuffer is created. Then sex energy remains repressed at the source of the spine and does not rise in the spine. That’s what they say in the East: Once the sex energy rises in the spine, you start becoming very very happy. When the sex energy reaches to the seventh — SAHASRAR — you flower into a lotus bloom. Your life then is a deep ecstasy.
Awareness is the true path. Neither indulge nor renounce, but be aware. Do whatsoever you are doing — do it with full awareness. If you move into passion, move with awareness; and passion becomes prayer, and passion has a totally different quality to it. In the East we have called that quality tantra. The same sex is no longer sex — it is no longer sexual at all. Once you move into your passion with awareness, you have changed the very quality of it. It is no longer just physical, it is no longer just a physical release; it is a very deep experience of life. It is a tremendous experience of no-mind. It is a door towards the greatest space possible.
In deep orgasm, if you are aware, you will know for the first time what ecstasy is. Otherwise you have only heard the word; you have not known its meaning. Only in deep orgasm, if you are aware, if your flame of awareness is burning bright, will you be able to know that sex is not just sex. Sex is the outermost layer; deep inside is love; and even deeper is prayer; and deepest is God himself. Sex can become a cosmic experience; then it is tantra. Sex plus awareness… and something tremendous starts changing.
When sex becomes an obsession, it takes perverted forms

Some Fact About Marriage

Only fools think in terms of legality; otherwise, love is enough. And I am not against marriage — I am for love. If love becomes your marriage, good; but don’t hope that marriage can bring love. That is not possible. Love can become a marriage. You have to work very consciously to transform your love into a marriage.
Marriage is a totally different phenomenon: it is the climax of love. Then it is good. I am not against marriage — I am for the REAL marriage. I am against the false, the pseudo, that exists. But it is an arrangement. It gives you a certain security, safety, occupation. It keeps you engaged. Otherwise, it gives you no enrichment, it gives you no nourishment.
Marriage has made love disappear badly, marriage has made love disappear from the earth. Because for other considerations marriage is arranged — money, finance, family, prestige, astrology — all absurd. They have nothing to do with the heart of the two persons who are going to be married. So marriage is almost always a failure; only in rare accidents it is not so — but they are accidents, exceptions. They cannot be counted. Marriage is always on the rocks, because it is for wrong reasons. Only love can become the foundation of a real marriage, there is no other way. Because there is no other way to find that your wave length is exactly the same as the other’s, that you vibrate in the same way as the other. There is no other way to find it out.
Be a little aware before you are trapped! Marriage is a trap: you will be trapped by the woman and the woman will be trapped by you. It is a mutual trap. And then legally you are allowed to torture each other forever.
The first thing is love: love deeply. If you have been with a person for a few years, in deep love, and you have experienced all the joys and all the miseries, and still you decide to be with the person, then marriage is okay. Because marriage is only a legal arrangement, it cannot make anything more beautiful than it is. It can only make it ugly, it cannot beautify it. Once it is settled legally, once you start taking each other for granted, things will start going down rather than rising high.
I have never said that love is destroyed by marriage. How can marriage destroy love? Yes, it is destroyed in marriage, but it is destroyed by you, not by marriage. It is destroyed by the partners. How can marriage destroy love? It is you who destroy it, because you don’t know what love is. You simply pretend to know, you simply hope that you know, you dream that you know, but you don’t know what love is. Love has to be learned; it is the greatest art there is.
Your marriage is a subtle politics of domination. Your fatherhood, motherhood, is a subtle politics.
Love marriage’ came into existence but is not going to survive, for the simple reason that love comes, happens, and one day suddenly goes. It was not in your hands to bring it; neither is it in your hands to keep it. The old marriage failed because the insistence was that you should love your wife, you should love your husband. It was a `should’. And you could not even conceive how you could love; at the most you could pretend, you could act. But love is not a pretension, is not an acting. You cannot do anything. You are absolutely powerless as far as love is concerned. The old marriage failed. The new marriage is failing because the new marriage is simply a reaction to the old marriage. It is not out of understanding, but only out of reaction, revolt — `love marriage.’
One should marry only when one is wise enough. Marriage is not for young people. For young people is to fool around. Marriage is for those who have experienced life in many ways, who have seen all the colors, the whole spectrum of it, and are now ready to settle.
I am all for love, because love fails. You will be surprised — I have my own logic. I am all for love, because love fails. I am not for marriage, because marriage succeeds; it gives you a permanent settlement. And that is the danger: you become satisfied with a toy, you become satisfied with something plastic, artificial, manmade.
But I am all for love, and I am against marriage, particularly the arranged kind, because the arranged marriage gives you satisfaction. And love? — love can never satisfy you. It gives you more and more thirst for a better and better love, it makes you more and more long for it, it gives you tremendous discontentment. And that discontent is the beginning of the search for God. When love fails many times, you start looking for a new kind of lover, a new kind of love, a new quality of love. That love affair is prayer, meditation, sannyas.
I am basically against marriage; obviously the question of divorce does not arise. I am against the accidental birth of people, because that is the basic cause for the earth being burdened with the retarded. I am in absolute agreement that love should be just play; the moment you start producing children it becomes business. And I cannot agree to produce this kind of humanity. I was teaching that whenever a couple… of course unmarried, because the law has nothing to do with your love. Love should be a freedom between two persons, and if from even one person love disappears they have to separate, as friends, with gratitude for all the beautiful moments they lived together. Loving affairs ending in the courts are absolutely ugly.
You have not looked at the poor woman for years, for the simple reason that marriage makes things so certain. Marriage makes things so dead and dull. Marriage takes all surprise and wonder away. Marriage makes you take your wife for granted, your husband for granted. What is the need to look at your wife? She will be there tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and forever. You look at people when you know you may not be able to look at them again. Marriage kills; it makes something tremendously beautiful very ugly.
I have never heard about any perfect marriage. They say perfect marriages are made in heaven. Nobody comes back from there so maybe it is true, but what kind of marriage will those perfect marriages be? There will be no tension, there will be no individuality in the man or in the woman. They will never collide, they will never fight. They will be too sweet to each other. And too much sweetness brings diabetes!
Marriage is an institution that teaches a man regularity, frugality, temperance, forbearance and many other splendid virtues he would not need had he stayed single.
Marriage itself never destroys anything. Marriage simply brings out whatsoever is hidden in you — it brings it out. If love is hidden behind you, inside you, marriage brings it out. If love was just a pretension, just a bait, then sooner or later it has to disappear. And then your reality, your ugly personality comes up. Marriage simply is an opportunity, so whatsoever you had to bring out will come out.I am not saying that love is destroyed by marriage. Love is destroyed by people who don’t know how to love. Love is destroyed because in the first place love is not. You have been living in a dream. Reality destroys that dream. Otherwise love is something eternal, part of eternity. If you grow, if you know the art, and you accept the realities of love-life, then it goes on growing every day. Marriage becomes a tremendous opportunity to grow into love.
Marriage exists as an institution of exploitation, it is not togetherness. That is why no happiness comes out of it as a flowering. It cannot. Out of the roots of exploitation how can ecstasy be born?
Marriage almost always never happens, because marriage means the celebration of togetherness. It is not a license. No registry office can give you marriage; no priest can give it to you as a gift. It is a tremendous revolution in the being, it is a great transformation in your very style of life, and it can happen only when you celebrate togetherness, when the other is no longer felt as the other, when you no longer feel yourself as I. When the two are not really two, a bridge has happened, they have become one in a certain sense. Physically they remain two, but as far as the innermost being is concerned, they have become one. They may be two poles of one existence but they are not two. A bridge exists. That bridge gives you glimpses of togetherness. It is one of the rarest things to come across a marriage. People live together because they cannot live alone. Remember this: because they cannot live alone, that is why they live together. To live alone is uncomfortable, to live alone is uneconomical, to live alone is difficult, that is why they live together. The reasons are negative.
Marriage is not a natural phenomenon. It is artificial, arbitrary. And when it disappears you cannot do anything to bring it back. You can pretend, but that pretension makes you a hypocrite. And your pretension cannot deceive the woman, because she has known your love and the pretension cannot become the substitute. The only way is to separate — in friendship, because you have given each other so much.
As I see it, out of a hundred marriages ninety-nine marriages are just licensed prostitution. They are not marriages. A marriage is only a real marriage when it grows out of love. Legal, illegal, does not matter. The real thing that matters is love. If love exists between two persons, it is blessed. If love does not exist between two persons, then all your laws put together cannot bridge them. Then they exist separate, then they exist apart, then they exist in conflict, then they exist always in war. And they create all kinds of trouble for each other. They are nasty to each other, nagging to each other, possessive of each other, violent, oppressive, dominating, dictatorial. In a better world, with a better humanity, things will be different. In a better world, the child born out of love will not be called bastard; the child only born out of license, law, will be called bastard.
Bring more understanding to it. You will not be able to separate easily because love is involved. Without love marriage is easy, divorce is easy. It does not matter either way; it is a simple, utilitarian arrangement. If things-are going well, good; otherwise, say ‘goodbye’. But when you are involved in each other it is not easy, it is difficult. A part of your being has become incorporated in his being, a part of his being has become incorporated in your being. You really don’t exist as two individuals any more — you exist as a couple. A couple does not mean two persons living together. A couple means: two persons plugged into each other — no more really two… trying to be separate and yet trying to be together. That is the difficulty: one wants to remain dependent and one wants to remain independent. One is asking for two polar opposites.
What do marriage vows show? They show that you may want to separate sometime in the future. If there is love between two people, the thought of taking vows never arises. This is only an indication of the absence of love. People do not marry out of love; they marry out of fear. If there is love on this earth, marriage will become redundant. When love is not, marriage is a must. We make arrangements for that which we cannot do. We make rules for that which we are not sure of.

Some Facts About Love

When knowledge exists not, there is love. Knowledge is against love. Knowledgeable people cannot love… and people who can love are never knowledgeable. Love makes you wise, but never knowledgeable. Knowledge makes you cunning and clever, but never loving.
The known is the mind, the unknown is God. And Jesus says: God is love. Love comes through the unknown, with the unknown, as part of the unknown. To move into the unknown one needs courage, tremendous courage. To cling to the known there is no need to have any courage: any coward can do it, cowards only do that.
To transcend contradictions is to transcend mind, and to transcend mind is to know what love is. Whatsoever you have known up to now as love has nothing to do with love. It is a misuse of the word. `Love’ has been very much misused. There are only a few words which have been misused like `love’. `God’ is another, `peace’ is another. But `love’ is at the top of the list. Everybody talks about love and nobody knows what it is. People sing about it, people write poetry about it, and they don’t know what love is.
Love knows no object, love is not addressed. Love is only of God. When you love your woman, if you really love her, you will see the woman has disappeared and god is standing there. If you love the tree, you will suddenly see the tree has disappeared and God is very green in it, blooming. Love is only of God. Love is never of the part, love is only of the whole. Love is almost synonymous with prayer.
Love yourself so that you can love others.
People escape to the Himalayas: they are escaping from love, not from the world. They are afraid of love, and their fear has some reason behind it. Whenever you are in love, you are in a turmoil. Whenever there is love there is difficulty; whenever there is love there is conflict; whenever there is love there is hell. Says Jean-Paul Sartre, “The other is hell.” So whenever there is love the other enters your life, and suddenly there is conflict, collision, struggle to dominate each other, to possess each other, to master each other. And the misery arises. Lovers are rarely happy. I am not saying that non-lovers are happy; non-lovers may not be happy, but they are never so unhappy as the lovers.
Either move through love, and you will attain to God, or move through God, and you will attain to love. They come together; it is one package. The hen and the egg are not separate — the egg is nothing but a way for the hen to produce more hens, and the hen is nothing but a way for the egg to produce more eggs. They are not separate. The egg is the hen unmanifest, and the hen is the egg manifest. They are two ends of one thing, of one phenomenon. So are God and love.
Love is possible only if there is no possessiveness and no jealousy. That means love has attained to renunciation. You love the person but you renounce possessiveness; you love the person but you renounce jealousy; you love the person but you don’t want to make a slave out of him or out of her; you love the person but you respect his or her freedom; you love the person but your love does not become an imprisonment. You love, and yet you remain unattached. You love, you love tremendously, but still you don’t cling: that is renunciation.
If your love is so great that it can contain renunciation, only then is it love.
This whole existence is in love: these trees are moving tremendously in love; these stars, these rivers rushing towards the ocean, are rushing towards a love-affair where they can meet and merge. Watch, and you will find everywhere the shadow of love, the thrill, the excitement, the ecstasy of love. Whatsoever the form, if you look deeply, you will always find something throbbing at the center which cannot be anything other than love.

Some Fact About Life

People come to me and they ask, ‘What is the meaning of life’ As if meaning is there somewhere sold in the market. As if meaning is a commodity. Meaning has to be CREATED. There is no meaning in life. Meaning is not a given thing, it has to be created. It has to become your inner work. Then there is meaning — and there IS GREAT meaning. Love and meditate and you will attain to meaning. And you will attain to life, and abundant life.
This is the way to be ready: exert yourself sincerely — not seriously but sincerely. There are people who are always doing things halfheartedly; lukewarm is their life. They never achieve anything because they are always holding back. They never move into anything totally, intensely. They are always standing on the bank and thinking of the farther shore. Or even if sometimes they try, they are riding on two horses; in case the one fails, the other will always be there. They are riding in two boats. Their life is so divided that whatsoever they do they always do with a dividedness. And any flowering of consciousness is possible only when there is an organic unity in you.
The religious person is ordinary, very ordinary. He lives a very simple, unpretentious life with no claim to extra-ordinariness. But that’s what makes him extraordinary.
Life should be lived naturally, life should be lived according to the laws of nature — not according to the laws of Manu, not according to the ascetics, not according to the saints, but according to the Dhamma. Ais dhammo sanantano, Buddha says: This is the eternal law. We have to find the eternal law in things, how the whole universe runs in a harmony, how there is such tremendous order. It is not a chaos, it is a cosmos. Man has also to become a cosmos, and it is possible only through love.
I agree with the Zen people: the small things of life have to be transformed by your inner transformation. This I call the religious quality; everything becomes sacred. Taking a bath, making love, eating food, going to sleep — everything becomes sacred, because wherever you look is God and whatsoever you do you do WITH God.
It is said the first thing that Zarathustra did in his life was to laugh the moment he was born. Now children are not supposed to laugh when they are born, they are supposed to cry! Zarathustra laughed, and that laughter remained like an undercurrent his whole life. He is the most life-affirmative Buddha ever. He loved life so deeply that for him there was no God other than life.
LIFE is basically insecure. That’s its intrinsic quality; it cannot be changed. Death is secure, absolutely secure. The moment you choose security, unknowingly you have chosen death. The moment you choose life, unawares you have chosen insecurity.
The American way of life depends on ambition, and my new man has to be utterly ambitionless. America’s whole approach is: things should be bettered, everything should be made better. It does not matter where it is going to lead, but things have to be better, better and better. They are obsessed with the idea of bettering things. You have to have more speed, better machines, better technology, better railroads, better roads — everything better! Of course, in the same way, you need a better man. It fits with the whole American style of life.
The new man will have a totally different vision of life. He will live in a more loving way, because to him love is richness. He will know that money cannot buy love or joy. He will know that money is utilitarian; it is not the goal of life.
This is the way people are — just living in a thick cloud of unconsciousness. Their life is not that of light but of darkness, and out of this darkness, confusion, smoke, what can you expect? They are bound to do something foolish, something wrong.
Man goes on arguing about great things, but goes on living in a totally different way. His thoughts are very great; his life is very.immature. In fact, he creates all those great thoughts to cover up his immaturity.
My approach is totally different. I declare to you that you are perfectly right, that nothing is wrong with you, that you are not to follow somebody else, that you are not to imitate anybody else, that you have to love yourself, trust yourself, that you have to live a life of freedom, a life of rebellion, a life of exploration.
My own experience is this: that life has to be used in its totality, in all its dimensions. Yes, even the darker ones, they have their own share to contribute to the richness of life. Whenever you make a division that “this is good and this is bad,” that “this should be and this should not be,” you are creating trouble for yourself. Life is one organic unity. When it is night, sleep; when it is day, wake up. Don’t hanker for the night in the day; don’t hanker for the day in the night.
Individuality makes your life significant. It makes your life a beautiful song, but the song is no more yours, the song is God’s. Individuality is divine. You are simply a hollow bamboo: you become a flute on the lips of God or on the lips of the whole existence. Then whatsoever the whole wants, you allow it; you remain in a let-go.
Life is insecurity and nothing is wrong in it. In fact, life cannot be otherwise. Death is secure, life is insecure. Marriage is secure, love is insecure. Marriage is dead, love is alive. The more alive you are the more your life remains in insecurity, because the livelier person will be exploring the unknown, he will be adventurous. It is life’s nature, its law, its very intrinsic soul. But the priest has exploited it. He has given you consolations, securities, insurances, not only for this life but for future lives too. He says, “Don’t be worried. If you follow a certain code of conduct, if you cultivate a certain character, if you follow the commandments given in the scriptures, then you need not be afraid. Then God is going to reward you. You will be punished only if you go against the convention, against the tradition.”
I am not teaching you a religion which is life-negative. I am teaching a religion which is absolutely life-affirmative. Life is God.

Some Fact About Relationships

ove is never a relationship, and relationship is never love. Love relates, but it is not a relationship. Relationship is a dead thing, a closed thing. Love is a flowing.
Relationship may be just out of fear, may not have anything to do with love. Relationship may be just a kind of security — financial or something else. The relationship is needed only because love is not there. Relationship is a substitute. Become alert! Relationship destroys love, destroys the very possibility of its birth.
For attachment you need not be aware and alert. There is no need. Even animals can be attached very easily, rather, more easily. A dog is more attached to his master than any man can be. The dog is completely unconscious so attachment happens. That is why in the countries where human relationship has become poor, such as in the West, man goes on seeking relationship with animals, with dogs, with other animals, because the human relationship is no longer there. Human society is disappearing and every man feels isolated, alienated, alone. The crowd is there but you are not related to it. You are alone in the crowd and this aloneness scares. One becomes afraid and fearful.
Two individuals relating remain individuals; two individuals getting into a relationship lose their individuality. They become a couple, and to be a couple is an ugly thing. That means you have lost your freedom, you are no more yourself; the other is also no more himself or herself. Both have lost their freedom and nobody has gained anything out of it.
Our relationship with persons is also as it is with things. A husband behaves towards his wife as if she is a thing: he possesses her. The wife possesses the husband just like a thing. If we behaved with the other as if they were persons then we would not try to possess them, because only things can be possessed.
For attachment you need not be aware and alert. There is no need. Even animals can be attached very easily, rather, more easily. A dog is more attached to his master than any man can be. The dog is completely unconscious so attachment happens. That is why in the countries where human relationship has become poor, such as in the West, man goes on seeking relationship with animals, with dogs, with other animals, because the human relationship is no longer there. Human society is disappearing and every man feels isolated, alienated, alone. The crowd is there but you are not related to it. You are alone in the crowd and this aloneness scares. One becomes afraid and fearful.
If you behave as if everything is a thing, then you are the center and things are just to be used. The relationship becomes utilitarian. Things have no value in themselves — the value is that you can use them, they exist for you. You can be related to your house — the house exists for you. It is a utility. The car exists for you, but the wife doesn’t exist for you and the husband doesn’t exist for you. The husband exists for himself and the wife exists for herself. A person exists for himself; that is what being a person means. And if you allow the person to be a person and don’t reduce him to being a thing, you will by and by start feeling him. Otherwise you cannot feel. Your relationship will remain conceptual, intellectual, mind to mind, head to head — but not heart to heart.
When you are in love, then you start showing your real face. Love is a mirror. The other starts functioning a mirror. Every relationship becomes a mirror. Alone, you don’t experience your own smell — you cannot; one becomes immune to it. You have lived with it so long, how can you smell it? It is only with the other that you start feeling that he stinks and he starts feeling that you stink. And the fight starts
When one becomes too fed up with ordinary relationships with people one starts imagining a relationship with God; that is the longing for the divine. Now God is a little better in the sense that you can never be disappointed because you will never meet him; for the simple reason that there is going to be no honeymoon, the honeymoon can never be over; for the simple reason that there is going to be no living together with God, you can go on hoping. Now you are alone: it is a monologue, it is not a dialogue.
Relationship originates in misery, relating originates in bliss.
When you enter into a love relationship with a Master — that’s what entering into a Buddhafield is — you start losing your old identity, your definition becomes blurred. It was arbitrary anyway — it starts melting; your limits start merging with the unlimited. You are no more somebody; you start becoming a nobody, a nothingness.

Some Fact About Jealousy

If your love stinks, then try to find out what exactly it is that stinks. It is not love, it is something else. Love itself has a fragrance; it can’t stink, it is a lotus flower. Something else must be in it — jealousy, possessiveness.
If it is jealousy, then I would only suggest one thing: be more watchful of your jealousy. When it arises next time, rather than becoming mad, close your doors, sit silently, sit in meditation, watch your jealousy. See exactly what it is. It will surround you like smoke, dirty smoke. It will suffocate you. You would like to go out and do something. But don’t do anything; just be in a state of non-doing, because anything done in a moment of jealousy is going to be destructive. Just watch. And I am not saying repress it, because that is again doing something.
Whenever it possesses you, meditate over it. Slowly slowly, the meditation will create the distance between you and the jealousy. And the greater the distance, the less jealousy will arise. And one day, when there is no jealousy, your love releases such a fragrance that no flower can compete with it. All flowers are poor compared to the flowering of love. But your love is crippled because of jealousy and possessiveness and anger.
Once man becomes aware of this phenomenon, that love is inexhaustible, that there is no scarcity, jealousy will disappear. Jealousy is part of the economy of scarcity.
The whole life is celebrating, millions of happinesses happening all over the universe, but if you have an attitude of jealousy, you will be miserable, you will be in a constant hell. And you will be in a hell precisely because all over there is heaven. You will create a hell for you – a private hell — because whole existence is celebrating.
Zarathustra is immensely in love with life and all that life provides. He is the only mystic with immense affirmation of life. There is no place for renouncing anything — life is a gift of existence. Learn to enjoy it! Relish in it! Dance with the trees, and dance with the stars. Love without jealousy. Live without competition. Accept everybody without judgment. And then there is no need for any God. And there is no need for any paradise.
People come to me and they say they would like to be happy, but they cannot drop their jealousy. If you can’t drop your jealousy, love will never grow — the weeds of jealousy will destroy the rose of love. And when love does not grow, you will not be happy. Because who can be happy without love growing? Unless that rose blooms in you, unless that fragrance is released, you cannot be happy.
We bring our children from the very beginning with it — jealousy, envy. We make them fight, struggle. Our whole idea of life is based on survival of the fittest, and the fittest means the strongest, the most cunning. So whatsoever the means, nobody cares about the means. You have to achieve some end, you have to prove your mettle. You have to show to the world that you are not an ordinary person.
Remember the real problem is not anger. The real problem is unawareness. So next time be more aware. Whether it is anger, hatred, jealousy, possessiveness, a thousand and one things are there… but the real disease is one — unawareness. These are all facets of the same thing. So if you try to change that — these problems — you will never be able to cope, because they are millions.
These problems — jealousy, possessiveness — are not really problems but symptoms, symptoms that you don’t yet know what love is. We take it for granted that we know what love is, and then the problem of jealousy arises. That is not right. The problem is arising because love is not yet there; it simply shows that love has not yet arrived, it simply shows the absence of love. So you cannot solve it.
My approach is: don’t be bothered about jealousy, otherwise you will be getting into such a trap that you will never be able to get out of. Forget about it! It is symptomatic, it is simply indicative. It is good that it indicates something; it is a signal that love has not yet happened. It is good! Learn something from it, take note of it and start moving into love. Enjoy love more and there will be less jealousy. Delight in love more and there will be still less jealousy. Let your love become a totality, a madness. Let it have an intensity, and in that intensity jealousy will be burned out. A real lover has never known what jealousy is.
Put more energy into love. Rather than putting energy into analysing jealousy and fighting with it, put more energy into love. Otherwise you will be distracted: you will start following jealousy, and that is a desert. You will never come to its end.
Competition and jealousy is the root cause of all misery. There is no good competition — all competition is bad.
When you become aware, you suddenly become aware that love cannot exist with jealousy — it is not possible. When love is there jealousy cannot exist. If jealousy exists then love cannot exist — they never go together. But whatsoever is called love is ninety-nine percent jealousy, possessiveness… more of an effort to dominate or sometimes even to be dominated — an effort to be dominated — but that’s not much difference. That too is a subtle trick of the same game. When love is there, there is no question of domination. Then it is not politics, and one is not ambitious.
So become very alert. Your alertness will destroy many things in you. All that is destructive will be destroyed: jealousy, possessiveness, anger — they will be destroyed. And when all these negative qualities are no more there, something blooms in you that you are not yet alert about… a totally new flower.
Remember, jealousy can be dropped. In fact why people don’t drop it is a miracle because they don’t get anything out of it except misery! Unless people are masochists there seems to be no reason why they continue with jealousy.
Drop the jealousy rather than dropping love. The fear comes because of jealousy. The fear comes because of the ego — the other may reject you: then drop the ego! Rather than throwing the bathwater, you are keeping the bathwater and throwing the baby! Drop ego, drop jealousy, and take the risk. Life is a risk — that’s why it is so beautiful, of value, because it is a risk. It is an adventure. Good!

Some Fact About Happiness

This relaxation is the space in which happiness grows, and again I repeat: for no reason at all. It is not that you are happy because of something. You are simply happy. Happiness is your nature.
Unhappiness is something nurtured, you have learned it. Every credit goes to you for all your misery, but for happiness, you cannot have any credit. It is natural. You were born happy. You were happy in your mother’s womb….
Don’t choose. Accept life as it is in its totality. You must look at the total: life and death together, love and hate together, happiness/unhappiness together, agony/ecstasy together. If you look at them together, then what is there to choose? If you see they are one, then from where can choice enter? If you see agony is nothing but ecstasy, ecstasy nothing but agony; if you can see happiness is nothing but unhappiness; love is nothing but hate, hate is nothing but love — then where to choose? how to choose? Then choice drops.
Remember this. This is the difference between happiness and bliss. Your happiness is caused. Sometimes a friend has come and you are happy. How long are you going to be happy with the friend? A few moments — and then you will be happy when he leaves. What type of happiness is this? It is caused, and the cause disappears. Sooner or later you become fed up and it disappears. Bliss is a happiness uncaused. Simply as you are, you are happy. There is nothing to say about why you are happy.
Look at the whole thing. You never think why you are miserable — you are simply miserable. Whenever you are happy you start looking, “Why am I happy?” Misery seems to be natural; happiness seems to be something unnatural happening sometimes. Misery is your state and happiness is your hankering. An enlightened person is simply happy, just as you are simply miserable. Simply happy! and is never miserable. Even sometimes when the shoe pinches, he simply puts it right. It is not misery, it is simply physical pain — a discomfort, but not misery. He simply puts the feet right; he changes the shoes, or he walks without the shoe. Discomfort can happen to an enlightened man, but never misery — because how can misery happen? When there is no cause for his blissfulness misery is impossible. you caused, you cannot destroy it. Uncaused, how can you take it away? Uncaused, there is no opposite to it. This is ANANDA.
Bliss is not the same. It is uncaused. It is not a tension and release, is not concerned with tension and release at all — it is simply the happiness that comes when you feel good with existence, when you feel you accept. When you feel that you accept, you suddenly feel the whole existence accepts you. Then you can bless the whole, and the whole blesses you. It is uncaused. It cannot be taken away. You cannot make me miserable. You can at the most make me uncomfortable, that’s all.
Just look: happiness, unhappiness, sadness, joy, they come and go, they are beggars around you. The witnessing remains the very center, uncaused, unchanging, one. Seek that within you and then everything becomes clear. When you are clear within, everything is transparent. The truth is everywhere around you, only you have to become one.
Once you know the inner riches, then there is nothing which is comparable from the outside world. Once you know the inner bliss, then enjoyment is foolish, then all that goes on in the name of entertainment is foolish, stupid. It just falls down once you know the inner ecstasy. Then all that is known as happiness, joy, is nothing but deception. But not before — unless you have known the inner happiness you cannot say that, and if you say that then you will be in a greater deception.
Happiness needs no cause. It is your simple nature, you are intrinsically happy. No cause, no purpose, no goal is needed. Life is in itself enough. It needs nothing else to complete it. It is complete! It is entire! It is already what it has to be. So there is no purpose in existence and no goal in existence. Existence is a sheer dance.
There is no reason at all to be miserable. In fact, misery should be very exceptional; happiness should be simply natural. You should not ask anybody, “Why are you looking happy?” But this is the situation. If you are looking happy and smiling and enjoying yourself, everybody will look, stare at you, as if something has gone wrong: What has happened to this poor fellow? Why is he smiling and enjoying? — there seems to be no reason.
All unhappy individuals resemble each other; only happy individuals have a uniqueness. Happiness, growing towards blissfulness, makes you unique in a world which is full of misery.
A healthy psychology is not ambitious — you are happy as you are, so there is no need for you to become a president of the country. Then will you be happy? No president is happy, because happiness has nothing to do with your post, with your money, with your power. It has something to do with your inner change, inner transformation.
Never forget that money can’t buy happiness.
Each act: if you are compassionate to someone, you feel a joy of being compassionate — that is its reward. If you are angry at someone, you are first burning inside yourself. Even before you have acted on your anger, you have suffered the punishment. In my vision every action has its intrinsic reward or punishment. So a man of intelligence soon starts finding what are the acts which bring you happiness, joy, blissfulness, and what are the actions which create misery, suffering. There is no need to wait for the last judgement day, there is no need to wait after death — you will be thrown into hell or into heaven. Each moment completes itself.
That is the simple secret of happiness. Whatever you are doing, don’t let past move your mind; don’t let future disturb you. Because the past is no more, and the future is not yet. To live in the memories, to live in the imagination, is to live in the non-existential. And when you are living in the non-existential, you are missing that which is existential. Naturally you will be miserable, because you will miss your whole life.
I don’t believe in nationalism, and I don’t believe in any religion. I believe in the individual and his happiness.
The real is beyond happiness and unhappiness. It is neither tense nor relaxed, it is neither dark nor light; it is beyond. When all duality has ceased then you are blissful. Hindus have called that ananda — it means ‘beyond the two’. You cannot say a sage is happy. He is not happy because happiness has to be followed by unhappiness. You cannot say a sage is unhappy. A sage is blissful, he has passed the duality. Now there are no hills and no valleys; he moves on the ground, he moves on one level. There are no ups and downs because ‘up’ and ‘down’ exist as a duality.
You may be seeking happiness, but not truth. Happiness happens when truth is achieved. But if you are seeking happiness you cannot achieve truth, because happiness is a byproduct; you cannot achieve it directly, there is no way to it — it comes via truth. If you reach the true, happiness will happen; it is a shadow, it comes with the truth. But if you seek happiness, then happiness is not possible and truth is missed.
Whenever you feel happy, you were not looking for it. That is the first basic thing about happiness: it happened when you were looking for something else. For example, you have heard the story of Archimedes: he was in search of a scientific truth. He worked, experimented, thought, pondered over it many days and nights. He forgot himself. Then suddenly, when he was in his bath one day, lying down in his tub, it happened, it bubbled up — he realized. He was naked, but he forgot that he was naked. When you are happy you forget yourself; if you cannot forget yourself you are not happy. Happiness means you are no longer there; it happens only when you are not.
Remember moments of happiness: you were not there. It may have happened in a deep love, it may have happened in a discovery, or it may have happened just when you were playing cards, but you became so lost… suddenly the upsurge!
Be happy when alone. Let happiness be your quality. And when you move from aloneness into involvement, into communication, relationship, carry that quality of happiness which was in loneliness — carry that.
The more you ask for happiness, the more you will be in suffering. The suffering is a shadow. The greater the desire for happiness, the greater will be the shadow. Ask for happiness and you will never get it. You will only suffer frustration. Why? Because there is only one way to be happy, and that is to be happy here, now. Happiness is not a result. It is a way of life. Happiness is not the end result of desire. It is an attitude, not a desire. You can be happy here and now if you know how to be, but you will never be happy if you don’t know how to be and you go on desiring it. Happiness is an art. It is a way of life.
Why is man unhappy? No animal is so unhappy, no bird is so unhappy, no fish is so unhappy as man. Why is man so unhappy? Because man desires happiness, and the birds are happy right now; the trees are happy right now. Man desires happiness; he is never happy here and now. He always desires happiness and goes on missing it. Happiness is here. It is happening all around you. Allow it to enter within. Be part of existence. Don’t move into the future. Existence never moves into the future; only mind does. This is what I call meditation: to be here, to not move into the future. Be nonambitious, kill all desire for life, don’t desire happiness and then you will be happy and no one can destroy your happiness. Then it will be impossible for you to be unhappy. And then you will be deathless and eternal life will have happened to you. In fact, it has already happened but you are not aware of it. Then you will be fulfilled. Nonambitious, you will be fulfilled.

Some Fact About Fear

Fear is made of ignorance of one’s own self. There is only one fear; it manifests in many ways, a thousand and one can be the manifestations, but basically fear is one, and that is that “Deep inside, I may not be.” And in a way it is true that you are not.
Fear is the shadow of ‘I’, and because the ‘I’ is always alert somewhere deep down that “I will have to disappear in death”…. The basic fear is of death; all other fears only reflect the basic one. And the beauty is that death is as nonexistential as ego, and between these two non-existentials — the ego and death — the bridge is fear.
Nothing is ever born out of fear. Love gives birth, love is creative; fear is impotent.
Fear is utterly impotent. It has never created anything. It cannot create; it is not. But it can destroy your whole life, it can surround you like a dark, dark cloud, it can exploit all your energies. It will not allow you to move into any deep experience of beauty, poetry, love, joy, celebration, meditation. No, it will keep you just on the surface because it can exist only on the surface. It is a ripple on the surface.
Certainly, if you are not aware of who you are, you cannot be love. You will be fear. Fear is just the opposite of love. Remember, hate is not the opposite of love, as people think; hate is love standing upside down, it is not the opposite of love. The real opposite of love is fear. In love one expands, in fear one shrinks. In fear one becomes closed, in love one opens. In fear one doubts, in love one trusts. In fear one is left lonely, in love one disappears.
Society reduces small children to slaves; and one can be reduced to a slave only if great fear is created.
The young child is free of fear; children are born without any fear. If the society can help and support them to remain without fear, can help them to climb the trees and the mountains, and swim the oceans and the rivers, if the society can help them in every possible way to become adventurers, adventurers of the unknown, and if the society can create a great enquiry instead of giving them dead beliefs, then the children will turn into great lovers, lovers of life — and that is true religion. There is no higher religion than love.
To expose oneself creates great fear. It is natural, because to expose oneself means to expose all the rubbish that you carry in your mind, the garbage which has been piling up for centuries, for many, many lives. To expose oneself means to expose all one’s weaknesses, limitations, faults. To expose oneself ultimately means to expose one’s vulnerability. Death…. To expose oneself means to expose one’s emptiness.
Out of fear is the pretension, out of fear arises all pseudoness. One needs to be fearless to be authentic.
Fear is natural. Don’t condemn it, and don’t feel that it is something wrong. It is just part of this whole social upbringing. We have to accept it and go beyond it; without condemning it we have to go beyond it.
You cannot conquer fear. Fear has to be understood. The moment you start thinking of conquering it, you have already accepted its existence, its power over you. And fear is just like a shadow: you can fight with it, but you cannot win. On the path one has to be very aware whether one is fighting with something that does not exist but is only his own projection; otherwise the journey goes on becoming longer and longer.
Fear is a by-product of your unconsciousness, so the only way to get rid of it, to know its bogus reality, is to become conscious. It is not a question of conquering; fear has nothing to do with it. Once you know what death is, fear disappears.
Man is living in fear. He is doing everything out of fear. If he does not do it he will lose respectability; if he does not do it according to the idea of others, he will not be thought to be somebody special. It is all fear, and out of fear nothing great ever comes. Anything great is born only out of love, meditation, silence, understanding. If you create out of fear it is not creation. Your fear will be there, just like a shadow, destroying the beauty of your creation.
In this nothingness, in this emptiness, in this selflessness, in this shunyata, there is complete security and stability. You will be surprised to know about this — complete security and stability when you are not. All fears disappear… because what is the basic fear? The basic fear is the fear of death. All other fears are just reflections of the basic fear. All other fears can be reduced to one fear: the fear of death, the fear that, “One day I may have to disappear, one day I may have to die. I am, and the day is coming when I will not be” — that frightens, that is the fear.
To avoid that fear we start moving in such a way so that we can live as long as possible. And we try to secure our lives — we start compromising, we start becoming more and more secure, safe, because of the fear. We become paralyzed, because the more secure you are, the more safe you are, the less alive you will be.
Once you have known this inner emptiness then there is no fear, because death has already happened. In that emptiness it has happened. In that emptiness you have disappeared. How can you be afraid anymore? About what? About whom? And who can be afraid? In this emptiness all fear disappears because death has already happened. Now there is no longer any death possible. You feel a kind of deathlessness, timelessness. Eternity has arrived. Now you don’t look for security; there is no need.
If you start living in the moment, fear disappears. Fear comes through desire. So basically, desire creates fear. Look into it. Whenever there is fear, see from where it is coming — what desire is creating it — and then see the futility of it.
When you are nothing, fear disappears, and when fear disappears you function intelligently. If fear is there you cannot function intelligently. Fear cripples you, paralyzes you.
Fear is poison to intelligence. How can you be intelligent if there is fear? The fear will go on pulling you in different ways. It will not allow you to be courageous, it will not allow you to step into the unknown, it will not allow you to become an adventurer, it will not allow you to leave the fold, the crowd. It will not allow you to become independent, free; it will keep you a slave. And we are slaves in so many ways. Our slavery is multidimensional: politically, spiritually, religiously, in every way we are slaves, and the fear is the root cause of it.

Some Fact About Death

Whoever may have died right now… each death is your death, because each death is a reminder that you are not going to be here forever. Each death is an opportunity to be awake. Before death comes use the opportunity of life to attain something which is beyond death.
The secret is, start living more fully, more totally. Be more alert so that you can find within yourself something that is unreachable by death. That is the only shelter, the only security, the only safety. And if you want to help your friends and family, let them become aware of this secret.
The danger is more, but as life is itself always in the grip of death, it is a good opportunity to be aware. Otherwise your death comes without any pre-information: suddenly it comes and you don’t have even a single moment. And even in cases where death is certain — in cancer or in AIDS — the doctors, the family, the friends, everybody tries to hide the fact that it is so close… with good intentions, but good intentions won’t do. They are harming the person. The person should be made aware: “Your death is going to come within one month. You don’t have any more life, so this month do the best thing that can give you a taste of immortality.” Then when you die there is no sadness, no misery — you simply move from this body into another body, or if you become enlightened… A sudden awareness of death can make you enlightened.
A man of realization knows there is no death. Death is a fiction, you have never died. Yes, you have changed your form many times. You have changed your house many times, many times. But you have never died. Have you ever seen yourself dying? It is always somebody else who dies.
life and death are two phases of the same energy. Death is not the end of life. Death itself is part of life, and life goes on. You have died many times, and still you are alive. Your life is eternal. Death is a small episode here and there, when you change your house, but the essential of your being remains the same. How many times you change houses does not matter, but it is inconceivable to the mind.
Mind only thinks about things. “What will happen after death?” Why can’t you wait? One thing is certain: you will die — I guarantee it! How you prefer to die, that is another matter.
You were a child, you have become a grown-up, you will become old. This is phenomenal, this is unreal. But there is something within you which never becomes anything other than itself. In your childhood it is the same, in your youth it is the same, in your old age it is the same, in your death it is the same. A man of meditation knows his eternal being, his immortal being. There is no deathbed for him.
A right kind of education will teach people to live herenow, to create a paradise of this earth, not to wait for death to come, and not to wait for death to come, and not to be miserable till death stops your misery. Let death find you dancing and joyous and loving. It is a strange experience that if a man can live his life as if he is already in paradise, death cannot take away anything from that man’s experience.
Because of our mind we always divide everything into opposite polarities. Delusion and enlightenment, night and day, birth and death, they are all one process but the mind cannot conceive it. It is intrinsically incapable of conceiving of the oneness of life and death, of light and darkness.
Once enlightened, your death is going to be the last death. In other words, only enlightened people die. The unenlightened … very difficult — they go on coming back, they never die. Only the enlightened person can afford death; the unenlightened cannot afford it, he is not yet ready. Life is a school, and unless you have learned the lesson you will have to come back again and again to the same class. Once you have learned the lesson, passed the examination, then even if you want to come back into the class you will find all doors are closed for you. You have to move higher, to a different level of being.
The authentic man lives the unknown, allows the unknown, moves on the unknown path, risks everything. He may not find gold mines, but he finds a tremendous satisfaction. His life is a life of blessings; his death is a death of fulfillment.
The whole function of the master is to create such energy, such a magnetic force that you are pulled in and slowly, slowly start disappearing. And a point comes when you have become one with existence. This I call real death.
The ordinary death that you see every day is not real death; It is only a change of the house, or a changing of your clothes. The master is the real death — because once you are consumed in the energy that the master makes available to you, you will not be coming back into any form; you will disappear into the vast universe. It is death from one side: you will not be this small, imprisoned soul.
It is life eternal from the other side: you will be freed from the prison and you will become one with life itself. You will not be separate; you will be immortal, you will be universal. Just all your misery, all your limitations — the birth, the death, the old age — all these will disappear. You will be simply young, vibrating, eternal life. On the one hand the master is a death. On the other, he is the resurrection.
If you have known life, you will have certainly known death — and then death is not the enemy, death is the friend. Then death is nothing but a deep sleep. Again there is a morning, again things will start. Then death is nothing but rest — a tremendous rest, needed rest. After the whole life of toil and tiredness, one needs a great rest in God. Death is going back to the source, just as in sleep.
Every night you die a little death. You call it sleep; it would be better to call it a little death. You disappear from the surface, you move into your innermost being. You are lost, you don’t know who you are. You forget all about the world, and the relationship, and the people. You die a small death, a tiny death, but even that tiny death revives you. In the morning you are full of zest and juice again, again throbbing with life, again ready to jump into a thousand and one adventures, ready to take the challenge. By the evening you will be tired again. This is happening daily. You have not even known what sleep is; how can you know death? Death is a great sleep, a great rest after the whole life. It makes you anew, it makes you fresh, it resurrects you.
Live the way existence wanted you to live. Your very life should be so intense and so total that you burn your life’s torch from both ends. In that very intensity you will know that you have touched something of eternity. And if you have known it in your life, in your death you will find a deeper confirmation of the fact. People who live in personality always die unconscious. They have never lived. They don’t know what consciousness is, so before death they become unconscious. That’s why we don’t remember our past lives. You were unconscious, and death happened in your unconsciousness. But if you live consciously, as an individual, then you will die consciously, the way Socrates is dying — so conscious to the last breath. And this memory will be with you in the next life too.

Some Fact About Frienship

Friendship is possible between equal human beings, totally free from all bondage of society, culture, civilization, only living true to their authentic nature.
Only individuals can relate; personalities cannot. Personalities are like shadows. They cannot meet, they cannot merge, because they don’t exist. Personalities are fake. That’s why in the whole world people are talking of love, but there is no love. They are talking of friendship, but there is no friendship — even talking of trust. But for that a tremendously powerful individuality is needed. Personalities cannot trust; they are always afraid — afraid that their reality may be exposed, may be known.
Friendship can turn into enmity, and enmity can become friendship. You all know — happiness can turn into sadness, and sadness can change into happiness. Although they are polar opposites, they are almost like twins, very close. Just a slight change in circumstances and one disappears …the other was just behind it. So remember the transcendent — existence belongs to the transcendental. Don’t divide it; otherwise you will be continuously tortured by the duality.
In this ambitious world, friendship cannot bloom, love is almost impossible, compassion cannot exist. We have created such an ugly mess, and the root is that we think that there is something to achieve.
A man who seeks friendship, love, companionship, out of loneliness is not going to find it. In fact, with whomsoever he will associate he will feel cheated and he will make the other feel cheated. He will feel tired and bored, and he will make the other feel tired and bored. He will feel sucked and he will make the other feel sucked, because both will be sucking on each other’s energies. And they don’t have much in the first place. Their streams are running very thin; they are like summer streams in a desertland. You cannot take any water out of them. But if you seek friendship and love and companionship out of aloneness, you are a flooded river, a river in the rains. You can share as much as you want. And the more you share, the more you will have.
The proverb is: A friend in need is a friend indeed. But deep down that is greed! That is not friendship, that is not love. You want to use the other as a means, and no man is a means, every man is an end unto himself. Why are you so worried about who is a real friend?
The real question has to be: Am I friendly to people? Do you know what friendship is? It is the highest form of love. In love, some lust is bound to be there; in friendship, all lust disappears. In friendship nothing gross remains; it becomes absolutely subtle.
Friendship is absolutely human. It has something for which there is no inbuilt mechanism in your biology; it is nonbiological. Hence one rises in friendship, one does not fall in friendship. It has a spiritual dimension.
Friendship becomes a relationship, fixed; friendliness is more flowing, more fluid. Friendship is a relationship, friendliness is a state of your being. You are simply friendly; to whom, that is not the point. If you are standing by the side of a tree you are friendly to the tree, or if you are sitting on the rock, you are friendly to the rock. To human beings, to animals, to birds, you are simply friendly. It is not something static; it is a flow, changing moment to moment.
Friendship is so valuable that whatsoever the consequence, remain friends even with your wife, even with your husband, and allow absolute and total freedom to each other.
Create more friends, and as your friendship goes deeper into different dimensions, you will find yourself becoming richer and richer; your own heights will start reaching Everest, your own depths will start reaching the Pacific.
EVERYBODY is your enemy! Even those who are your friends are your enemies, because they are also fighting for the first place as you are fighting. How can you be friendly? With the ego there is no possibility of friendship. Then friendship is just a mask. The real nature of life is that of the jungle: the big fish goes on eating the small fish. Even if you pretend to be friendly, that is just show, strategy, diplomacy. Nobody can be a friend here unless the ego disappears. Once the ego disappears the whole life has a quality of friendship, of love. Then you are friendly, simply friendly — and to everybody, because there is no problem. You are not trying to be the first, so you are not more a competitor. this is real dropping out.

Some Fact About Money

Our whole attitude about life is money-oriented. And money is one of the most uncreative things one can become interested in. Our whole approach is power-oriented and power is destructive, not creative. A man who is after money will become destructive, because money has to be robbed, exploited; it has to be taken away from many people, only then can you have it. Power simply means you have to make many people impotent, you have to destroy them — only then will you be powerful, can you be powerful.
A man becomes too much attached to money — money is accidental. It has nothing to do with essential life. A man becomes too much attached to his house or to his car, or to his wife, or to her husband, to children, to relationship. Relationship is accidental; it has nothing essential in it. It is not your real being. And in this century, the twentieth century, the problem has become too deep. There are people who call the twentieth century ‘the accidental century’ — they are right People are living too much identified with the non-essential: money, power, prestige, respectability. You will have to leave all that behind when you go. Even an Alexander has to go empty-handed.
If you love money and you want to be creative, you cannot become creative. The very ambition for money is going to destroy your creativity. If you want fame, then forget about creativity. Fame comes easier if you are destructive.
If you know how to enjoy a roseflower, a green tree in your courtyard, the mountains, the river, the stars, the moon, if you know how to enjoy people, you will not be so much obsessed with money. The obsession is arising because we have forgotten the language of celebration. Hence money has become the only thing to brag about — your life is so empty. I will not tell you to renounce money. That has been told to you down the ages; it has not changed you. I am going to tell you something else: celebrate life, and the obsession with money disappears automatically. And when it goes on its own accord, it leaves no scratches, it leaves no wounds behind, it leaves no trace behind.
Searching for money, what are you really searching? You are searching power, you are searching strength. Searching for prestige, political authority, what are you searching? You are searching power, strength — and strength is all the time available just by the corner. You are searching in wrong places.
We have been distracted into unnatural motivations: money, prestige, power. Listening to the cuckoo is not going to give you money. Listening to the cuckoo is not going to give you power, prestige. Watching the butterfly is not going to help you economically, politically, socially. These things are not paying, but these things make you happy.
You are not feeling empty because you don’t have much money. You are feeling empty because you have not yet encountered your real self, you have not come to your authentic individuality.
When you don’t have any money, any things, any house — if you are unattached, what is the difficulty in it? But when you have everything and you remain unattached — a beggar in the palace — then something very deep has been attained.
I am not against money, remember. Don’t misinterpret me: I am not against money — I am not against anything. Money is a means. If you are happy and you have money, you will become more happy. If you are unhappy and you have money, you will become more unhappy because what will you do with your money? Your money will enhance your pattern, whatsoever it is. If you are miserable and you have power, what will you do with your power? You will poison yourself more with your power, you will become more miserable. But people go on looking for money as if money is going to bring happiness. People go on looking for respectability as if respectability is going to give you happiness. People are ready, at any moment, to change their pattern, to change their ways, if more money is available somewhere else.
The materialistic pattern of life is that where money predominates over everything. The non-materialistic life is that where money is just a means — happiness predominates, joy predominates; your own individuality predominates. You know who you are and where you are going, and you are not distracted. Then suddenly you will see your life has a meditative quality to it.
Have you watched it? A man who is too greedy about money, by and by starts having the qualities of money. He becomes just money. He loses spirituality, he is no more a spirit. He is reduced to a thing. If you love money, you will become like money. If you love your house, by and by you will become material. Whatsoever you love, you become. Love is alchemical. Never love the wrong thing, because it will transform you. Nothing is so transforming as love. Love something which can raise you higher, to higher altitudes. Love something beyond you.
Money should not be in the hands of individuals; otherwise it will create this problem of being burdened with guilt. And money can make people’s lives very rich. If the commune owns the money, the commune can give you all the facilities that you need, all the education, all creative dimensions of life.
One of the greatest problems that money creates is that you never know whether you are loved or your money is loved, whether you are desirable or your money is desirable. And it is so difficult to figure out, that one would have preferred not to have had money; at least life would have been simple.
People go on postponing everything that is meaningful. Tomorrow they will laugh; today, money has to be gathered… more money, more power, more things, more gadgets. Tomorrow they will love — today there is no time. But tomorrow never comes, and one day they find themselves burdened with all kinds of gadgets, burdened with money. They have come to the top of the ladder — and there is nowhere to go except to jump in a lake.
The mind always hankers for more and more. If you have money, it hankers for more money; if you have prestige, it hankers for more prestige; if you have knowledge, it hankers for more knowledge. Mind lives in the “more.”
There are many kinds of richness, and the man who is rich because of money is the lowest as far as the categories of richness are concerned. Let me say it in this way: the man of wealth is the poorest rich man. Looked at from the side of the poor, he is the richest poor man. Looked at from the side of a creative artist, of a dancer, of a musician, of a scientist, he is the poorest rich man. And as far as the world of ultimate awakening is concerned he cannot even be called rich.
You earn money, you become the richest man in the world — you become an Andrew Carnegie. And at the peak, when you have become the richest man in the world, suddenly you see your whole life has been a wastage. Money is there, but there is no contentment inside — and life has gone down the drain. You can see the misery of an Andrew Carnegie. When he was dying, somebody who was writing a biography said to him, “You must be the most contented man in the world.”
He said, “Contented? I am the MOST discontented man in the world! Don’t you know I am the wealthiest man in the world? That is my discontent. Now I know there is no more to wealth: all that is possible I have attained, and yet I am dying empty. My life has been just a wastage. Next time, if God gives me another opportunity, I am not going to try money any more — it has failed.”
What is wrong in having money? One should not be possessive; one should be able to use it. And Jews know how to use it! One should not be miserly. Money has to be created and money has to be used. Money is a beautiful invention, a great blessing, if rightly used. It makes many things possible. Money is a magical phenomenon. If you have a ten-rupee note in your pocket, you have thousands of things in your pocket. You can have anything with those ten rupees. You can materialize a man who will massage your body the whole night! Or you can materialize food or you can materialize ANYTHING! That ten-rupee note carries many possibilities. You cannot carry all those possibilities with you if there is no note; then your life will be very limited. You can have a man who can massage your body, but then that is the only possibility you have with you. If you suddenly feel hungry or thirsty, then that man cannot do anything else. But a ten-rupee note can do many things, millions of things; it has infinite possibilities. It is one of the greatest inventions of man; there is no need to be against it. I am not against it. Use it. Don’t cling to it. Clinging is bad. The more you cling to money, the poorer the world becomes because of your clinging, because money is multiplied if it is always moving from one hand to another hand. In English we have another name for money which is more significant — it is “currency.” That simply indicates that money should always remain moving like a current. It should always be on the move from one hand to another hand. The more it moves the better.
For example, if I have a ten-rupee note and I keep it to myself, then there is only one ten-rupee note in the world. If I give it to you and you give it to somebody else and each person goes on giving, if it goes through ten hands then we have a hundred rupees, we have used a hundred rupees’ worth of utilities; the ten rupees is multiplied by ten. And Jews know how to use money; nothing is wrong in it. Yes, greed is bad. Greed means you become obsessed with money; you don’t use it as a means, it becomes the end. That is bad, and it is bad whether you are a Jew or a Jaina, Hindu or Mohammedan; it doesn’t matter.
If you watch carefully, money, power, prestige — nothing satisfies. On the contrary, they make you more discontented. Why? — because when you were poor there was a hope that one day the money was going to happen and all would be settled and settled forever, and then you would relax and enjoy. Now that has happened, and there seems to be no sign of any relaxation. In fact, you are more tense than before, you are more anxiety-ridden than before. Money has brought a few blessings, but in the same measure it has brought many curses too. You can have a bigger house, but now you will have less peace. You can have a bigger bank balance, but you will also have a bigger madness, anxiety, neurosis, psychosis. Money has brought a few things which are good; in the wake of it many other things have arrived which are not good at all. And if you look at the whole thing, the whole effort has been a sheer wastage. And now you cannot have even the hope that the poor man can have. The rich man becomes hopeless. He knows now the money will go on increasing and nothing is going to happen — just death, only death. He has tasted all kinds of things; now he only feels a tastelessness. A kind of death has already happened, because he cannot conceive of how to fulfill that desire for expansion. If you watch carefully, money, power, prestige — nothing satisfies. On the contrary, they make you more discontented. Why? — because when you were poor there was a hope that one day the money was going to happen and all would be settled and settled forever, and then you would relax and enjoy. Now that has happened, and there seems to be no sign of any relaxation. In fact, you are more tense than before, you are more anxiety-ridden than before.
Money has brought a few blessings, but in the same measure it has brought many curses too. You can have a bigger house, but now you will have less peace. You can have a bigger bank balance, but you will also have a bigger madness, anxiety, neurosis, psychosis. Money has brought a few things which are good; in the wake of it many other things have arrived which are not good at all. And if you look at the whole thing, the whole effort has been a sheer wastage. And now you cannot have even the hope that the poor man can have. The rich man becomes hopeless. He knows now the money will go on increasing and nothing is going to happen — just death, only death. He has tasted all kinds of things; now he only feels a tastelessness. A kind of death has already happened, because he cannot conceive of how to fulfill that desire for expansion.

Some Facts About Mind

The moment the person withdraws from the mind, the mind has no energy to go on into old routines. It is your identity with the mind that gives power to it. You have taken your identity back, you are no longer nursing the mind; it starts dying. The farther you go away from it, the more and more your mind dies. And to attain a state of no-mind is what I call health. That is the goal of meditation. Then your spirit is healed, you have become whole.
The ordinary man is being used by his mind. When it becomes too much, when the mind starts using you completely in a totalitarian way, we call it madness.
There is no God, there has never been. Man has created God according to his own image because it is something that is needed by the sick mind. The healthy mind has no need for a God, the healthy mind has no need for a prayer. The healthy mind has no need for churches, temples, mosques, synagogues.
People are ready to throw their garbage, their advice, their wisdom, their knowledge, everybody is ready to catch hold of you and put something in your mind. You are already too much burdened. Subjective art burdens you more. Objective art unburdens you. Subjective art should be part of psychiatric hospitals only. People suffering from mental sicknesses should be allowed painting, poetry, sculpture, anything they want. And it is going to help, it is therapeutic. It will make them healthy.
Conscious mind is personal, unconscious mind is impersonal. The collective unconscious mind is all that has preceded you: the whole history of mind is contained in it. But this cannot be the foundation. Below it there is a cosmic unconscious mind, which is the mind of the whole existence.
As you go higher than the conscious no-mind, you find superconsciousness, or the superconscious mind. This superconsciousness is exactly the equivalent of the lower collective unconscious mind.
Conscious mind is very small: one-tenth of the Unconscious mind. The unconscious mind is nine times bigger. Nine times more powerful. And it knows no reason.
To call darshan Indian philosophy is basically wrong. Philosophy is a mind thing — you think about it. Darshan is a realization, a thing of your innermost being; you realize it. Philosophy needs logic; darshan needs silence — no thoughts, everything in absolute nothingness. Only then you will come to know yourself. So I don’t call darshan Indian philosophy.
My understanding is that religion is the ultimate luxury. You have to feed your body first; if your body is hungry, it is impossible to become a buddha. You have to train your mind first, bring it to its highest peak of intelligence. If that is not possible, you cannot become buddha. These are the steps. The body has to be completely satisfied. The mind has to be sharpened, alert, aware, able to enjoy Mozart, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Picasso, Rabindranath. Only then is there a possibility of a new flight, because all these things give you a little joy but very momentary.
Repress anything and your mind becomes focused on it. For example, if it said to you that, “Don’t eat apples” then your mind will start fantasizing about apples.
The moment you believe, inquiry stops. Keep your mind open — neither believe nor disbelieve. Just remain alert and search and doubt everything. Unless you come to a point which is indubitable, that’s what truth is. You cannot doubt it. It is not a question of believing in it, it is a totally different phenomenon and you cannot doubt it. It is so much a certainty, so overwhelming you that there is no way to doubt it.
It is really amazing to watch people’s mind how they work and how they make themselves miserable and they go on weaving their misery deeper and deeper and more complex and more complex, to a point from where they cannot get out. And it is all their imagination.
There are not many hindrances but only few. One is a repressed mind because whatever you have repressed, whenever you will sit silent to meditate, that repressed idea, the repressed energy will be the first to overflow you and your mind. If it is sex, meditation will be forgotten and you will be having a pornographic session. So first thing is: drop repressions — which is very simple because they are not natural, they have been told to you… that sex is sin. It is not. Is is nature, and if nature is sin then I don’t think what can be virtue. In fact, going against nature is sin.
Meditation is not focusing your mind on something, it is emptying your mind of everything — your Gods included.
The Eastern mind is accustomed to belief. Faith has been emphasized for centuries; to doubt is a sin and to believe is a virtue. To me the reverse is the case: to doubt is virtue and to believe is sin.

Some Fact About Music

Music has tremendous power. It can possess. It can almost make you ecstatic.
To me, music and meditation are two aspects of the same phenomenon. And without music, meditation lacks something; without music, meditation is a little dull, unalive. Without meditation, music is simply noise — harmonious, but noise. Without meditation, music is an entertainment. And without music, meditation becomes more and more negative, tends to be death-oriented. Hence my insistence that music and meditation should go together. That adds a new dimension — to both. Both are enriched by it.
Music has been used by many religions as an approach towards prayer — because music will make your ears more vibrant, more sensitive. One has to become more of the ears and less of the eyes.
Much modern music is not music; it simply makes you sexually excited. It is just the opposite of real music. Real music helps you to transcend your biology, your physiology, your psychology. Real music takes you to the world of the beyond — what Buddha calls the farther shore, even beyond the beyond.
Music comes closest to meditation. Music is a way towards meditation and the most beautiful way. Meditation is the art of hearing the soundless sound, the art of hearing the music of silence — what the Zen people call the sound of one hand clapping. When you are utterly silent, not a single thought passes your mind, there is not even a ripple of any feeling in your heart. Then you start, for the first time, hearing silence. Silence has a music of its own. It is not dead, it is very much alive, it is tremendously alive. In fact, nothing is more alive than silence. Music helps you from the outside to fall in tune with the inner. Music is a device; it was invented by the buddhas. All that is beautiful in the world, all that is valuable in the world has always been discovered by the buddhas.
Osho to a Musician – You are a musician. Let music be your meditation. This is your religion — not Mohammedanism, not Hinduism, not Christianity. Music is your religion. If you are a dancer, then dancing is your religion.’
Listening to the music of the winds as they pass through the pine trees, what can you understand? Or listening to the sound of running water, what can you understand? Or looking at a beautiful sunset and all the colors spread over the horizon, what can you understand? What do you understand? But something happens which is far more precious than understanding. You fall in love, you feel it, you become it.
There is much more than music, because music is after all sound, and there is silence too. Music is beautiful but you should not forget silence. Dance is beautiful, but there is something beyond it: an absolute unmoving state of consciousness… no dance. There are beauties and beauties… and there are categories. Music and dance are very physical. As far as they go they are beautiful, but one should not get stuck with them, one should not be stopped by them. They should open the door for the higher realm. For example, if you are really a lover of music, soon music will be forgotten and you will be entering into silence. If you are really in deep attachment with dance, soon the dance has to disappear, so that you can be in an unmoving state of being.
When you are listening to music, what really touches your heart is not the sound but the gap between two sounds. How to bring that gap to your heart is the whole art of music. But if a man can bring that gap just by his presence, and you fall into deep silence, you will know the real music. Then you will know that what you used to think of as music was only a preliminary training. And the same is true about dancing, the same is true about every creative art. What it appears to be is not the reality; it is just a device so that you can become aware of something intangible, hidden, beyond. But to love music is good, to love dance is good, to play music is good, to dance is good — but remember, that is not the end. You have to go far — away from music, away from dance — to understand the real beauty of any creative art. Every creative art brings you to your innermost being where there is just calmness, utter quietness, absolute silence.
Sometimes you hear music and the mind stops. The music surrounds you, you are drowned in it. You are no more there. Just a transparent presence: the music goes through and through. In that moment, it is not only music that is happening; it is religion. But you don’t recognize it.
Look at modern music: it is simply insanity, it is not music. Just making noise is not music. It may help you to have some catharsis — that’s what music like jazz does, it is cathartic. You feel afterwards a kind of well-being, relaxed; but it is not music.

Music will make you silent, will make you disappear, will make you almost absent. Only the music will be there, not the musician — because in meditation the musician cannot exist. And if you are listening, soon you will find yourself melting, disappearing. It will create a new space within you. It has come out of meditation, and anyone who listens to it will feel something of meditation.
Listening to great music you suddenly become silent — with no effort. Falling in tune with the music you lose your ego with no effort. You become relaxed, you fall into a deep rest. You are alert, awake, and yet in a subtle way drunk.
If you want to enjoy classical Indian music you will have to learn. You cannot just go and enjoy it, it needs a certain preparation in you, it needs a certain receptivity in you. It is not vulgar. It needs a certain understanding in you… a deep understanding of sounds and silence — because music consists of sound and silence. It is not only sound, it contains silence in it. The music becomes higher and deeper when it contains more silence in it. When it provokes your silence, when it penetrates your heart and releases your inner silence, when listening to it your mind disappears, your thoughts stop…. But then you will have to learn, you will have to go through a certain discipline, you will have to become more meditative. One day you will be able to enjoy it. But if you want to enjoy it right now and you are not ready for it, don’t blame it.
A song has not to be thought about. If you start thinking, about a song, you are already missing it. When you listen to music, how do you listen? Do you bring your mind in? If you bring your mind in, where is the music? Music and the mind both cannot exist together. That is the mystery of music: you have to put your mind aside. You cannot argue with music; you cannot nod your head in agreement or disagreement. You cannot say, “Yes, I agree,” or “No, I don’t agree.” There is no question of agreement or no agreement. With music you simply become one. If you want to feel it you have to put your head aside. The heart has to open towards it. It goes directly to the heart, it showers on the heart. It helps the flower of the heart to open and bloom. It is a nourishment for the inner lotus.
Music is certainly next to meditation. But not the modern music, which is ugly, which is sexual, which draws you lower rather than taking you upwards. It does not give you more consciousness, higher skies to fly in; it brings you down, back to deeper gutters.

The real musicians will not accept this nonsense that goes on in the name of music. But young people who know nothing about music, who know nothing about meditation, who know nothing about silence, become fans, and they are mad about these idiots who think they are playing music. In any other wiser generation they would have been kept in psychiatric hospitals to be cured. They have gone berserk!