University Student

    1951-1957

    PART IV

    Contents

    Osho moves to Jabalpur

    Osho enrolls in Hitkarini College in Jabalpur, which is 80 miles from Gadarwara on main road and rail routes, so he remains in close contact with his family

    From my Nani's house I moved to my father's sister's house in Jabalpur. The husband, I mean my father's brother-in-law, was not very willing. Naturally, why should he be? I was in perfect agreement with him.

    Even if I had been in his place I would not have been willing either. Not only unwilling, but stubbornly unwilling, because who would accept a troublemaker unnecessarily? They were childless, so really living happily--although in fact they were very unhappy, not knowing how "happy" those who have children are. But they had no way of knowing either.

    They had a beautiful bungalow, with more room than for just one couple. It was big enough to have many people in it. But they were rich people, they could afford it. It was not a problem for them to just give me a small room, although the husband was, without saying a word, unwilling. I refused to move in.

    I stood outside their house with my small suitcase, and told my father's sister that, "Your husband is unwilling to have me here, and unless he is willing it would be better for me to live on the street than to be in his house. I cannot enter unless I am convinced that he will be happy to have me. And I cannot promise that I will not be a trouble to you. It is against my nature to not be in trouble. I am just helpless."

    The husband was hidden behind a curtain, listening to everything. He understood one thing at least, that the boy was worth trying.

    He came out and said, "I will give you a try."

    I said, "Rather you learn from the very beginning that I am giving you a try." He said, "What!"

    I said, "The meaning will become clearer slowly. It enters thick skulls very slowly."

    The wife was shocked. Later on she said to me, "You should not say such a thing to my husband, because he can throw you out. I cannot prevent him; I am only a wife, and a childless one."

    Now, you cannot understand.... In India, a childless wife is thought to be a curse. She may not be responsible herself--and I know perfectly well that this fellow was responsible, because the doctors told me that he was impotent. But in India, if you are a childless woman.... First, just to be a woman in India, and then to be childless! Nothing worse can happen to anybody. Now if a woman is childless, what can she do about it? She can go to a gynecologist...but not in India! The husband would rather marry another woman.

    And the Indian law, made of course by men, allows a husband to marry another woman if the first wife remains childless. Strange, if two people are involved in conceiving a child, then naturally two people are involved in not-conceiving too. In India, two people are involved in conceiving, but in not-conceiving only one--the woman.

    I lived in that house, and naturally, from the very beginning, a conflict, a subtle current arose between me and the husband, and it continued to grow. It erupted in many ways. First, each and every thing he said in my presence, I immediately contradicted it, whatsoever it was. What he said was immaterial. It was not a question of right or wrong: it was him or me.

    From the beginning the way he looked at me decided how I had to look at him--as an enemy....

    From Gadarwara I moved to Jabalpur. In Jabalpur I changed houses so many times that everybody wondered if it was my hobby, changing houses.

    I said, "Yes, it helps you to become acquainted with so many people in different localities, and I love to be acquainted."

    They said, "It is a strange hobby, and very difficult too. Only twenty days have passed and you are moving again." glimps37

    You will be surprised to know...I was very young when I became acquainted with a man, one of the most intelligent men I have come across, who was with Lenin and Trotsky in the Soviet revolution. His name was Manvendra Nath Roy. He was one of the members of the international commanding body of the communists, the Politburo. He was the only Indian who ever rose to that status, and he fought in the revolution side by side with Lenin.

    After the revolution he thought, "Now my work is in India. I have to go and create revolution in India." But here he found himself in utter difficulty, because the Hindu mind is more possessive than any other mind. It talks about non-possessiveness, it talks about celibacy, it talks about morality. But always remember, people who talk about these things are the people who are suppressing just the opposite...

    When M.N. Roy came to India, he found himself in an absolutely different world. He was thinking that because everybody had been teaching non-possessiveness, communism would be the easiest thing in India. This is where logic fails. He had read--he had lived his whole life in the West--he had only read about Indian scriptures, that they have been teaching non- possessiveness for centuries and centuries. So he thought people must be ready to give all their possessions to the collective; they will not have much difficulty in dropping their private possessions.

    But when he came to India he was utterly surprised. Nobody was ready; the very word

    `communism' was anathema. And because he was a well-educated man, well dressed, used to smoke cigarettes, the Indian mind turned absolutely against him.

    Mahatma Gandhi crushed that man, who was far more intellectual, far more significant than Mahatma Gandhi himself. But Mahatma Gandhi crushed him because people would rather follow Mahatma Gandhi, half-naked--it appeals to people. "This is a mahatma. And what kind of mahatma is this who is smoking cigarettes, who is well dressed in a poor country?" Nobody listened to M.N. Roy.

    Perhaps I was the only person who became very deeply interested in him. It was just by chance that I met him, in a train. I was going for my studies, traveling from my village to the bigger city to join a university. And just on the platform we were both waiting for the train...because in India no train ever arrives on time....

    The train was late and I was sitting on the bench, and M.N. Roy came and sat by my side. I was reading a book by Lenin, his collected works. He was surprised, because I was so young--may have been seventeen years old. He looked at the big volume, and he asked me, "Where did you get this collected works of Lenin?"

    I said, "I have the whole library of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, everybody."

    He said, "You are the first man...I have been here for seven years, continuously trying. Are you a communist?"

    I said, "Right now I am nobody. But who knows? I may turn out a communist. I am looking in every direction without any prejudice. Whichever dimension fulfills me totally, I will be that. Communism is my study, I am not a communist. I have to study many more things before I can decide. I have to look into anarchism, I have to look into socialism, I have to look into capitalism, I have to look into spiritualism. Before that I cannot say anything. I am just a seeker."

    We became friends. He talked about his experiences in the Soviet revolution, and he became a constant visitor to my small house.

    I was living outside the city in a very small house. Nobody else was ready to take that house because it was known as being haunted by ghosts. So when I asked the owner, he said, "Without any rent you can live there. At least somebody living there may create the idea in people that it is not haunted. If a small boy is living there alone..." So he said, "It is good. If you need anything I will support you. I want to sell it, but neither can I sell it nor is anybody ready to rent it. And I myself am afraid! My wife is not willing to move with me, otherwise we could sell this house and move there. That house is in a very beautiful location."

    It was absolutely alone. For miles there were no other houses, and behind were the beautiful Satpura Mountains. It was so peaceful there. He said, "I purchased it just to live there, but nobody is willing. So you start living there."

    I started living there, but I continued to create the fear in everybody that it was haunted by ghosts because if somebody purchased it, I would be thrown out. The owner heard that I was continuing to create the rumor. He came to me: "This is strange. I gave it to you free of charge..."

    I said, "I will keep it free of charge! But remember, it is haunted with ghosts. Don't come here-

    -whenever you want me, just phone me and I will come--it is dangerous!" He said, "And it is not dangerous for you?"

    I said, "I know a few secrets about ghosts. They are afraid of me. Do you know anything?" He said, "No, I don't..." I said, "You simply go back."

    And I lived in that house for almost ten years without any rent. On the contrary, I would order him, "Send me something"--and he would bring it--"otherwise I will leave the house."

    M.N. Roy used to come, and he loved the place. He used to live in the Himalayas in Nainital, but he said, "Even there it is too crowded, too many people have come. Roads, airport, buses--it is no more the old Nainital I used to know in my childhood before I left India. But your place..."

    I said, "This place will remain as it is, as long as I want to live in it. For miles nobody can build a house, because not only this house is haunted, the whole area is haunted!" I went on creating the rumor and making the area bigger. Nobody was ready, even at the cheapest rate, to purchase the land.

    When I talked with M.N. Roy, he said, "What do you think is the cause of my unsuccessfulness? I was such a successful member of the international high command of the communists. I fought in the revolution, I was a close friend of Lenin and Trotsky, who were the architects of the revolution. And here? I am nobody; nobody is ready to listen."

    I said, "Here, you will have to change. You will have to be a hypocrite. You will have to smoke in your bathroom, not in public--in public, speak against smoking. You will have to wrap yourself in a small cloth just covering you down to your knees, just like Mahatma Gandhi--or even smaller will be better. Shave your head and become a mahatma, and I can manage everything for you. But first become a mahatma. I will call a barber here, and he will make you a mahatma."

    He said, "My God--first I have to become a mahatma?"

    I said, "Without becoming a mahatma, in this country you don't have any appeal. This country is so fucked up that first you have to pretend all kinds of things. You don't drink tea--if somebody sees you drinking tea, finished! You are not a mahatma.

    "In the cold, you have to remain half-naked. You will get accustomed, don't be worried. All the animals are accustomed, and you are an intelligent animal so you will get accustomed. It is only a question of two or three years and then heat or cold, all are the same, because your skin becomes thicker and thicker. And your skull also becomes thicker and thicker! You will be a mahatma, and everybody will be listening to you."

    He said, "I cannot do that."

    I said, "Then forget all about leadership." And he died an unknown man. If he had lived in the Soviet Union he would have been a cabinet minister.

    This country is so prejudiced. fire05

    Osho confronts his professors

    It was a constant problem for me in my university. I have been expelled from many colleges and many universities.

    For the simple reason that I knew more than the professor. I was reading so much, and the professor had stopped reading thirty years before when he passed his Ph.D. and became a professor. He was finished. But in these thirty years so much had grown. These past thirty years man has grown in every dimension of knowledge, more than he has been able to in three thousand years.

    So when I entered the philosophical class, my professor had no idea of Jean-Paul Sartre, no idea of Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Soren Kierkegaard. Those names were not part of his education, because when he was studying these people were not in existence. They were not part of the curriculum. And what he remembered was Bosanquet, Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach. Now they are all outdated. They have been replaced by better minds, far more intelligent. I knew all about Kant and Hegel and Bosanquet, but I knew much more about Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, Sartre, Marcel. They had no idea of these people.

    It was a strange situation, because on every point they were feeling defeated. I was expelled just for the simple reason that the professors complained continuously against me, that I am a disturbance, that I don't allow them to move a single inch without days of argument. "And when are we going to finish the course? This boy seems not to be interested in the course and he brings such names which we have never heard. And now, in our old age, we are not going to read all that he is reading, and it is very awkward in front of the other students to feel that you know nothing about the latest developments in philosophy."

    My principals would call me and they would say, "We know perfectly well that you are not wrong. You are not being expelled for doing anything wrong. I feel sad and sorry for you, and I want you to forgive me, but we cannot lose the professor. He is our old, well-reputed professor, and he has threatened that either you will be in the university or he will be. He's given his resignation." They showed me his resignation. It said, "Either you expel that boy or accept the resignation."

    I said, "It is better you expel me, because what I am doing here I will do somewhere else. But your college, your university will miss a well-reputed professor. And I don't want him in his old age to find another job somewhere else; no, that is not for me to do. That is ugly. You call the professor, give him his resignation back, and tell him that I am being expelled."

    I have seen tears in my principals', in my vice-chancellors' eyes, that they are expelling somebody who has done no wrong. And I said to them, "You need not feel sorry about it. I have not done anything wrong, but I have done something far more dangerous, and that is make the professor feel embarrassed continuously every day."

    Now these professors could have bridged the gap. They could have simply said, "Perhaps you are right and we are wrong; but the reason is that we studied thirty years ago, and we don't know anything about what has happened within these years. Wittgenstein--the name we have heard for the first time from you. So naturally we cannot argue."

    Just this much was needed, and they would have gained my respect that they are capable men who can accept even ignorance. They are humble people who can say clearly, "I don't

    know, so you please don't bring these thirty years in. What I know I can discuss with you with full confidence, but you bring people's names, theories, ideas of which we know nothing. But just to pretend that we know we argue with you, and naturally we are defeated because we are not really aware of what you are saying and we don't understand the implications of it."

    They had known Aristotle and his logic, but they had no idea that modern physics has gone beyond Aristotle, and his whole logic has been proved wrong. Now I was reading Albert Einstein whose whole life's experiments, philosophy, simply eliminate Aristotle, who has been the dominant figure in the world of logic for two thousand years, from the roots. Aristotle is thought to be the father of logic in the West. They were not aware that Albert Einstein had already finished him; there is no Aristotle anymore of any significance. They had known Euclid and his geometry, but they were not aware that now his geometry is no longer applicable. Modern physics has developed non-Euclidian geometry, had to invent it. They were simply shocked because they had never thought that Euclid could be wrong. last212

    The first college I entered, I wanted to learn logic. And the old professor, with many honorary degrees, with many books published in his name, started talking about the father of Western logic, Aristotle.

    I said, "Wait a minute. Do you know that Aristotle writes in his book that women have less teeth than men?"

    He said, "My God, what kind of question is this? What has it to do with logic?"

    I said, "It has something very fundamental to do with the whole process of logic. Are you aware that Aristotle had two wives?"

    He said, "I don't know...from where are you getting these facts?"

    But in Greece it was traditionally known for centuries that women were bound to have everything less than men. Naturally, they couldn't have the same number of teeth as men.

    I said, "And you call this man Aristotle the father of logic? He could have at least counted-- and he had two wives available, but he did not count. His statement is illogical. He has simply taken it from the tradition, and I cannot trust in a man who has two wives and writes that women have less teeth than men. This is a male chauvinistic attitude. A logician has to be beyond prejudices."

    Seeing the situation, the professor threatened the principal that either I should be expelled from the college or he was going to resign. And he stopped coming to the college. He said, "I will wait three days."

    The principal could not lose an experienced professor. He called me into his office to say, "There has never been any trouble with that man, he is a very nice man. Just on the first day...what have you done?"

    I told him the whole story and I said, "Do you think it deserves expulsion from college? I was asking absolutely relevant questions, and if a professor of logic cannot answer, who is going to answer?"

    The principal was a good man. He said, "I will not expel you, because I don't see that you have done anything wrong. But I cannot afford to lose the professor either, so I will make arrangements for you in another college."

    But the rumor about me had spread in all the colleges. The city I was in had almost twenty colleges and finally it became a very prestigious university just by combining those twenty colleges. He sent me to another principal with a letter of recommendation, but he must have phoned him to say, "Don't believe in the letter of recommendation. I had to write it because I have to get rid of that student. He is not wrong, but he is absolutely individualistic and that is going to create trouble."

    I went to see the other principal, and he was waiting. He said, "I can admit you only on one condition: that you will never attend the college."

    I said, "Then what is going to happen when it is time for my examination?"

    He said, "I will give you the necessary percentage for being present in the college, but this is a secret pact between me and you."

    I said, "It is perfectly good--anyway your professors are out of date. But can I enter the library?"

    He said, "The library is perfectly okay, but never attend any class because I don't want to hear from any professor the complaint that you are creating trouble."

    And I have never created any trouble! I was simply asking questions which...if they were really gentlemen they would have said, "I will find out. For the time being, I don't know."

    But this is the most difficult thing in the world to say, "I don't know." mani10

    In the college, I used to have a long robe, with a wraparound lungi as it is used in India, and with no buttons on the robe, so the chest is open. And I was very healthy and robust, one hundred and ninety pounds.

    The principal told me, "Coming to the college without buttons is not according to the etiquette."

    I said, "Then change the etiquette, because my chest needs fresh air. And I decide according to my needs, not according to anybody's idea of etiquette."

    In my first year in the college, I won the all-India university competition for debate, and the professor in charge--he is dead now, Indrabahadur Khare--was a very properly dressed man.

    Everything about him was proper. He took me to a photo studio near the college, because they wanted my picture to be released to the newspapers, to the magazines, and particularly for the college magazine: I had won the all-India competition and I was just a first-year student.

    But he was very tense all the way to the studio. And when we entered the studio, he said, "Excuse me, but without the buttons, how will your photograph look?"

    I said, "It will look just like me! You have not won the debate, I have won the debate. And when I was debating there were no buttons, so what is the problem now? If I can win the debate without buttons, then my photograph has to be without buttons!"

    He said, "You do one thing"--he was a very small man. He said, "You can take my coat, it will fit you. You just put it on top of your robe and it will look beautiful."

    I said, "Then better you stand here and let it be perfectly proper. Let that picture go."

    He said, "That cannot be done. That will be simply objectionable. The principal will say, 'This is your photograph, and. '"

    So I said, "You should remember, my photograph has to be like me. I cannot use your coat. Either the photograph will go without buttons, or I am not interested in the photograph at all. So you decide."

    He had to decide for something very improper. He said, "I have never done anything improper, and I never allow anybody to do anything improper. But you seem to be strange."

    I said, "This is not improper."

    Every child is born naked--that is proper. Every animal is naked, and that is proper. But there are people addicted to properness. bond21

    Osho’s experiences as a Journalist

    The whole night I was working as an editor of a newspaper, and in the day I went to the university. For years I could not sleep more than three or four hours--whenever I could find time in the day or in the night. person13

    I was once an editor, and I resigned from the post because everything has to be pro- government. Truth is not the criterion. The poor individual is not to be protected. Government

    is already powerful and press also joins with government. That was one reason I resigned. I said, "I will say what I feel is the truth, whether it goes against government or anybody."

    Second thing I found, that they are not interested in any good news. They are interested only in rapes, murders, suicides, divorces, scandal. And I told them that these are dangerous. There may be a million men, and only one man rapes, and he becomes news. What about the remaining? last426

    Films are full of violence, full of sex, full of murder, rape, suicide...these are your demands. And the people who are producing those films or magazines or newspapers are just businessmen. I myself have been once a journalist but I could not go more than few weeks. The owner called me, he said, "You should have been born in satyug."

    I said, "What has happened?"

    He said, "You will destroy my paper. You have already reduced my readership to half."

    I said, "It does not matter if your paper is finished, that is not the point. But right things should reach to people."

    But he said, "They don't want the right thing, and I am not here for charity purposes. I am a businessman and I am in a trouble because we have made a contract for one year. In one year you will make me bankrupt!" Because I changed all politicians to the last page, I reduced their speeches to small articles not covering the whole first page, I removed their pictures, there is no need for their pictures every day to be insisted on people's mind. Because there are so many beautiful people and the world knows nothing about them.

    I would like a big picture of Ravi Shankar playing on his sitar on the front page. People should know....

    I would like some sculptor, some poet. the first page should be for the creators.

    And I reduced completely all news about suicide and murder, violence...and I said, that "It helps nobody. It really creates an atmosphere that violence is the way of life, everywhere it is happening, every newspaper is talking about it, everywhere there is rape. So why you are lagging behind, you also have a woman in your mind that you would like to rape. When everybody is doing it, then why not join?"

    I told him a story: two men are going to the market and one says, that "There is a riot between Mohammedans and Hindus and the Hindus are destroying the mosque. And as Hindus we should go and help."

    The other man said, that "That does not seem to be a right thing. The mosque has done no harm to us and even Mohammedans who go to the mosque simply pray there. That is the only place where they are prayerful and you are destroying it! That is illogical."

    Next day the man who was persuading that "We should go and destroy the mosque" was surprised. The first man was destroying it. He asked, "What has happened?"

    He said, "When I saw everybody is doing it then it must be right."

    When you read every day from every corner: the radio is saying the same thing, the television is saying the same thing, the newspaper is saying the same thing, the films are saying the same thing...you are surrounded by a very subtle mind atmosphere in which you are going to be drowned.

    I told my owner, that "I have been publishing because there are good things also happening in the world. It is not that everybody is raping, it is not that everybody is committing suicide, there are people who are doing some good work, beautifying life, helping people and I am trying to find those people and their work."

    Just that day I had published an article on Baba Amte. Very few people know about the man that he has devoted his whole life to the lepers, he has made a beautiful place for the lepers in Maharashtra. Thousands of lepers and he has proved it wrong that just by remaining in touch with lepers you will be infected. He lives with them, his wife lives with them, his children live with them and they all serve them and he has made all those thousands of lepers again human beings because they are all producing something. If their hands cannot do, then their feet can do something. If their feet cannot do, their hands can do something. Not a single leper is unproductive. And he has given them dignity. Otherwise they were thrown out of their towns, they were not allowed in the towns, nobody was ready even to talk to them, nobody was ready to give them any work. Now this man should be talked about.

    There may be many people who may become Baba Amte. There may be many people who may be lepers somewhere suffering, may go to his beautiful place. He calls it `Anandvan'--the forest of bliss. And it is a beautiful forest and something worth seeing, that how people which have been for centuries condemned can be raised back to dignity, to self-respect; now they are earning their own food, their own clothes and they are not dependent on anybody. You will be surprised that Baba Amte's colony donates to many charitable institutions.

    And when I used to go to his colony the people were so happy that we can help other people who are helpless just as we were helpless some day.

    "So let your circulation drop. I know that Baba Amte will not increase your circulation...Ravi Shankar will not increase your circulation. But don't be worried, I will not be heavy on you. I can force to remain for one year here to finish your firm, but I will not be heavy on you, I can understand you. So I can withdraw myself. You raise your circulation." last508

    Osho meets poets and musicians

    It is good not to meet the poet. Take it as a basic policy never to meet the poet because that will be a disappointment....

    This has been my general practice my whole life in India. I have read poets, heard poets on the radio, but I have not met them because my early experiences of meeting poets were just shipwrecked.

    One great Indian poet, Ramdharisingh Dinkar. He belongs to Patna. He has written some high-flying songs. He has contributed much to Indian poetry. He was known as the great poet, Mahakavi; not just kavi, a poet, but the great poet. He was the only man known as the great poet.

    He used to come to see me, unfortunately. He loved me, I loved him, but I could not like him. Love is spiritual, you can love anybody, but liking is far more difficult. Whenever he came he would talk of such stupid things that I told him, "Dinkar, one expects something poetic from you."

    He said, "But I am not a poet twenty-four hours a day."

    I said, "That's right! But come to me when you are!--otherwise don't come, because my acquaintance is with the poet Dinkar, not with you." Whenever he came, he would talk about politics--he was a nominated member of parliament--or he would talk about his sickness continually; he was making me sick! I told him, "Stop talking about your sicknesses, because people come to me to ask something of value, and you come to describe your sicknesses."

    But if I prohibited him from talking politics, he would talk of sicknesses. If I prohibited him from talking of sicknesses, then he would talk about his sons: "They are destroying my life. Nobody listens to me. I am going to send them to you."

    I told him, "You are too much. And you are spoiling my joy for when your book comes out: I cannot read it without remembering you. In between the lines you are standing there talking about your diabetes, your politics. "

    He would talk about diabetes, and he would ask for sweets! "these," he would say, "I cannot leave." He died because he continued to eat things that the doctors were prohibiting. And he knew it; he would tell me everything that the doctors had prohibited and ask me, "Osho, can you tell me some way that I can manage to eat all these things and still the diabetes. ?"

    In Jabalpur there was one famous poetess, Shubhadra Kumari Chauhan. I had read her poetry from my very childhood; her songs had become so popular because of the freedom struggle--she was continuously fighting for freedom and revolution--that even small children were reciting them. Before I was able to read, even then I knew a few of her songs. When I went to the university I discovered that she had also moved to Jabalpur. That was not her original place; her original place happened to be near my village. That I discovered later on,

    that she was from just twenty miles away from my village and that she had moved to Jabalpur just two years before I moved there.

    But seeing that woman, I said, "My God! Such beautiful poetry, and such an utterly homeless-

    -no, I mean homely. I got so distracted by her that I forgot even the word homely! Because

    she was worse than that, and I don't know any other word that is worse than that. "Ugly" does not look right to use for anybody; it seems to be condemning, and I only want to describe, not to condemn, hence homely. Homely means, you need not pay any attention; let her pass, let her go.

    Then there was another poet, of all-India fame, Bhavani Prasad Tiwari, who was in immense love with me. I was very young when I started delivering public discourses; I must have been twenty when I delivered my first public discourse, in 1950. He was the president.

    He could not believe it, and he was so overwhelmed that rather than delivering his presidential address he said, "Now I don't want to disturb what this boy has said. I would like you to go home with what he has said, meditating over it. And I don't want to give my presidential address--in fact, he should have presided, and I should have spoken." And he closed the meeting. Everybody was in a shock because he was an old man and famous. He took me in his car and asked me where he could drop me off.

    That day I became acquainted with him. I said, "It is a shock to me. You are certainly a loving person and also an understanding person. I have read your poems and I have always loved them. They are simple but have the quality of raw diamonds, unpolished. One needs the eye of a jeweler to see the beauty of an uncut, unpolished, raw diamond just coming out from the mine--just born.

    "I can also say I have always felt, reading your poetry, like when the rainy season first begins in India, and the clouds start showering, and the earth has a sweet smell of fresh, thirsty earth; and the smell of that earth getting wet gives you a feeling of thirst being satisfied.

    "That's how I have always felt reading your poetry. But seeing you I am disillusioned"-- because the man had on both sides, inside his mouth, two pans, betel leaves, and the red, blood-like juice of the betel leaves was dribbling from both sides of his mouth onto his clothes.

    That was a chain thing the whole day. All that he was doing was making new pans. He used to carry a small bag with everything in it. And whenever I saw him he was always--this is the way: tobacco in his hand, rubbing the tobacco, preparing it, chewing the pan, and the red juice was all around.

    I said, "You have destroyed my whole idea of a poet." Since then I have avoided poets because I came to know that they are blind people; once in a while they have a flight of imagination. But five thousand years ago, in the East, they must have understood that we have to make a distinction between the poet who is blind, and the poet who has eyes.

    A rishi is one who speaks because he sees. His poetry also has a different name; it is called richa because it comes from a rishi. Richa means poetry coming from the awakened consciousness of a being. person05

    I used to know a man--the whole city thought that he was mad, but I watched him very closely. He was one of the sanest men I have come across, and his sanity was that nobody could deceive him. If you had said to him, "You are very beautiful," he would say, "Wait, define beauty, what do you mean by beautiful? You will have to convince me. I cannot let you go so easily--and what is the purpose of calling me beautiful?" And it is very difficult to define beauty, almost impossible.

    If somebody would say to him, "You are very intelligent"...the same problem. Only on one point he would never argue with anyone. If people told him, "You are mad!"--he would say, "That's perfectly right, I am mad. From a madman you cannot expect anything: you cannot ask, `Can I borrow some money from you?' The moment you say `mad,' you have put me outside the society, you have made me an individual. Now you cannot manipulate me."

    He used to be a professor, but because of his strange behavior he was thrown out of his college. I used to go to him when I was a student. I liked the man very much. He played the flute so beautifully; I would simply go in and sit, and I never asked anything and I never said anything. One day he looked at me and said, "It seems you are saner than me."

    I asked him, "What do you mean by saner?"

    He said, "Right, absolutely right. You have got the point. I will never ask anything and never say anything. You are always welcome; there is no need to go through any social ritual. You can simply come and rest, sit."

    We became friendly. He was living in poverty, but he was immensely happy. He said, "I always wanted to be a flute player, never to be a professor. Just my parents forced me...but thanks to God the college people expelled me. Now I am absolutely free, and because people think I am mad nobody bothers me. I play my flute, I write songs. "

    He has translated into Hindi the poetry of Omar Khayyam. There are at least a dozen Hindi translations of the poetry of Omar Khayyam--some done by great poets--but none comes even close to his. And he lived a life of anonymity. It was I who insisted that his book should be published.

    He said, "Who is going to listen to me? I am a madman."

    I said, "Don't be worried. I will approach publishers and I will not mention your name in the beginning. First let them see the manuscript--because there are so many translations, but your translation is not only a translation but in some way an improvement."

    I have read Khalil Gibran, I have read Omar Khayyam. He was interested in these two men and was slowly, whenever he had time, translating them. But I told him, "No translation

    comes close to yours, and listening to you singing Omar Khayyam I sometimes feel perhaps the original Omar Khayyam does not have that quality, that much poetry, because he was not an insane man; he was a mathematician." Now, one cannot hope for a mathematician to write great poetry. These are opposite poles, poetry and mathematics--what do they have in common?

    Finally I persuaded a publisher...because he was also amazed and he was continuously asking who the translator was. When he was absolutely convinced that this was the best translation, then I told him the name. He said, "My God, but I used to think he is a madman."

    I said, "In this insane world, to be sane is to be mad. He is not insane at all, but he enjoys this idea that people have forgotten about him. Now nobody expects anything from him, nobody expects that he should behave in a certain way. He has attained freedom by being condemned as a madman. He is completely at ease with himself, he goes on doing his own thing and he is immensely happy."

    This man died very soon after. Perhaps he was poor and he could not afford medicine--he had tuberculosis--but he died so peacefully and so joyously...singing a song of Omar Khayyam. I was present when he died. The song that he sang last says...in Hindi, just as in English or Arabic, the body is called the earth. The word `human' comes from humus, and humus means mud. The word `adami' or `adam' comes also from mud.

    The song that he was singing and died singing was, "When I die, don't take my body to the funeral or to the cemetery. The earth in my body belongs to the pub"--he was a drunkard--"so please let my body be put in a grave inside the pub. I will be dead but others who will be alive...if they can just drop a few drops of wine over my grave, that will be enough satisfaction for me."

    You would not call him a saint, you would not call him religious--he was not, but he lived a life of utter simplicity, of tremendous beauty. He never harmed anybody, and there was a shine in his eyes because he knows something which other people don't know. tahui27

    I have heard Ravi Shankar play on the sitar. He has everything one can imagine: the personality of a singer, the mastery of his instrument, and the gift of innovation, which is rare in classical musicians. He is immensely interested in the new. He has played with Yehudi Menuhin; no other Indian sitar player would be ready to do it, because no such thing has ever happened before. Sitar with a violin? Are you mad? But innovators are a little mad; that's why they are capable of innovation.

    The so-called sane people live orthodox lives from breakfast till bed. Between bed and breakfast, nothing should be said--not that I am afraid of saying it. I am talking about "them." They live according to the rules; they follow lines.

    But innovators have to go outside the rules. Sometimes one should insist on not following the lines, just for not following's sake--and it pays, believe me. It pays because it always brings you to a new territory, perhaps of your own being. The medium may be different but the

    person inside you, playing the sitar or the violin or the flute, is the same: different routes leading to the same point, different lines from the circle leading to the same center. Innovators are bound to be a little crazy, unconventional...and Ravi Shankar has been unconventional.

    First: he is a pandit, a brahmin, and he married a Mohammedan girl. In India one cannot even dream of it--a brahmin marrying a Mohammedan girl! Ravi Shankar did it. But it was not just any Mohammedan girl, it was the daughter of his master. That was even more unconventional. That means for years he had been hiding it from his master. Of course the master immediately allowed the marriage, the moment he came to know. He not only allowed, he arranged the marriage. He too was a revolutionary, and of a far greater range than Ravi Shankar. Allauddin Khan was his name.

    I had gone to see him with Masto. Masto used to take me to rare people. Allauddin Khan was certainly one of the most unique people I have seen. He was very old; he died only after completing the century. When I met him he was looking towards the ground. Masto didn't say anything either. I was a little puzzled. I pinched Masto, but he remained as if I had not pinched him. I pinched him harder, but still he remained as if nothing had happened. Then I really pinched him, and he said, "Ouch!"

    Then I saw those eyes of Allauddin Khan--although he was so old you could read history in the lines of his face. He had seen the first revolution in India. That was in 1857, and he remembered it, so he must have been at least old enough to remember. He had seen a whole century pass by, and all that he did this whole time was practice the sitar. Eight hours, ten hours, twelve hours each day; that's the classical Indian way. It's a discipline, and unless you practice it you soon lose the grip over it. It is so subtle.... It is there only if you are in a certain state of preparedness; otherwise it is gone.

    A master is reported to have once said, "If I don't practice for three days, the crowd notices it. If I don't practice for two days, the experts notice it. If I don't practice for one day, my disciples notice it. As far as I am concerned, I cannot stop for a single moment. I have to practice and practice; otherwise I immediately notice. Even in the morning, after a good sleep, I notice something is lost."

    Indian classical music is a hard discipline, but if you impose it upon yourself it gives you immense freedom. Of course, if you want to swim in the ocean you have to practice. And if you want to fly in the sky, then naturally it is apparent that immense discipline is required. But it cannot be imposed by somebody else. Anything imposed becomes ugly. That's how the word 'discipline' became ugly--because it has become associated with the father, the mother, the teacher, and all kinds of people who don't understand a single thing about discipline. They don't know the taste of it.

    The master was saying, "If I don't practice even for a few hours nobody notices, but of course I notice the difference." One has to continuously practice, and the more you practice, the more you become practiced in practice; it becomes easier. Slowly slowly a moment comes when discipline is no longer a practice but enjoyment.

    I am talking about classical music, not about my discipline. My discipline is enjoyment from the very beginning, or from the beginning of enjoyment. I will tell you about it later on....

    I have heard Ravi Shankar many times. He has the touch, the magic touch, which very few people have in the world. It was by accident that he touched the sitar; whatsoever he touched would have become his instrument. It is not the instrument, it is always the man. He fell in love with Allauddin's vibe, and Allauddin was of a far greater height--thousands of Ravi Shankars joined together, stitched together rather, could not reach to his height. Allauddin was certainly a rebel--and not only an innovator but an original source of music. He brought many things to music.

    Today almost all the great musicians in India are his disciples. It is not without reason. All kinds of musicians would come just to touch Baba's feet: sitarists, dancers, flutists, actors, and whatnot. That's how he was known, just as "Baba," because who would use his name, Allauddin?

    When I saw him, he was already beyond ninety. Naturally he was a Baba; that simply became his name. And he was teaching all kinds of instruments to so many kinds of musicians. You could have brought any instrument and you would have seen him play it as if he had done nothing else but play that instrument for his whole life.

    He lived very close to the university where I was, just a few hours' journey away. I used to visit him once in a while, whenever there was no festival. I make this point because there were always festivals. I must have been the only one to ask him, "Baba, can you give me the dates when there are no festivals here?"

    He looked at me and said, "So now you have come to take even those away too?" And with a smile he gave me three dates. There were only three days in the whole year when there was not a festival. The reason was, there were all kinds of musicians with him--Hindus, Mohammedans, Christians--and every festival happened there, and he allowed them all. He was, in a real sense, a patriarch, a patron saint.

    I used to visit him on those three days, when he was alone and there was no crowd around. I told him, "I don't want to disturb you. You can sit silently. If you want to play your veena it is up to you, or whatsoever. If you want to recite the Koran, I would love it. I have come here just to be part of your milieu." He wept like a child. It took me a little time to wipe his tears away and ask, "Have I hurt you?"

    He said, "No, not at all. It just touched my heart so deeply that I could not find anything else to do but cry. And I know that I should not cry: I am so old and it is inappropriate--but has one to be appropriate all the time?"

    I said, "No, at least not when I'm here." He started laughing, and the tears in his eyes, and the laughter on his face both together were such a joy.

    Masto had brought me to him. Why? I will just say a few more things before I can answer it....

    I have heard Vilayat Khan, another great sitarist--perhaps a little greater than Ravi Shankar, but not an innovator. He is utterly classical, but listening to him even I loved classical music. Ordinarily I don't love anything classical, but he plays so perfectly you cannot help yourself. You have to love it, it is not in your hands. Once a sitar is in his hands, you are not in your own hands. Vilayat Khan is pure classical music. He will not allow any pollution; he will not allow anything popular. I mean "pop," because in the West, unless you say pop nobody will understand what is popular. It is just the old "popular" cut short--badly cut, bleeding....

    Ravi Shankar is even more arrogant, perhaps because he is a brahmin too. That is like having two diseases together: classical music and being a brahmin. And he has a third dimension to his disease too, because he married the great Allauddin's daughter; he is his son-in-law.

    Alauddin was so respected that just to be his son-in-law was enough proof that you are great, a genius. But unfortunately for them, I had also heard Masto. glimps35

    Influence of the mystic, Masto, continues

    Perhaps Masto wanted to go soon, and was just fulfilling the last task given by his guru, Pagal Baba. He did so much for me, it is difficult to even list it. He introduced me to people so that whenever I might need money I just had to tell them and the money would arrive. I asked Masto, "Won't they ask why?"

    He said, "Don't you be worried about it. I have answered all their questions already. But they are cowardly people; they can give you their money, but they cannot give you their hearts, so don't ask that."

    I said, "I never ask anybody for his or her heart; it cannot be asked. Either you simply find that it is gone, or not. So I will not ask these people for anything except money, and that too only if it is needed."

    And he certainly introduced me to many people who have always remained anonymous; but whenever I needed money, the money arrived. glimps33

    I was introduced to Indira too by Masto, but in an indirect way. Basically Masto was a friend of Indira's father, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India. He was really a beautiful man, and a rare one too, because to be in politics and yet remain beautiful is not easy...

    It was my feeling also, when I was introduced by Masto. I was only twenty. After only one more year Masto was to leave me, so he was in a hurry to introduce me to everybody that he could. He rushed me to the prime minister's house. It was a beautiful meeting. I had not expected it to be beautiful because I had been disappointed so many times. How could I have expected that the prime minister would not just be a mean politician? He was not.

    It was only by chance that, in the corridor as we were leaving and he was coming with us to say goodbye, Indira came in. At that time she was nobody, just a young girl. She was introduced to me by her father. Masto was present, of course, and it was through him that we met. But Indira may not have known Masto, or who knows?--maybe she did. The meeting with Jawaharlal turned out to be so significant that it changed my whole attitude, not only to him, but to his family too.

    He talked with me about freedom, about truth. I could not believe it. I said, "Do you recognize the fact that I am only twenty years old, just a young man?"

    He said, "Don't be bothered about age, because my experience is that a donkey, even if it is very old, still remains a donkey. An old donkey does not necessarily become a horse--nor even a mule, what to say of a horse. So don't you bother about age." He continued, "We can forget completely for a moment how old I am and how old you are, and let us discuss without any barriers of age, caste, creed, or position." He then said to Masto, "Baba, would you please close the door so that nobody enters. I don't even want my own private secretary."

    And we talked of such great things! It was I who was surprised, because he listened to me with as much attention as you. And he had such a beautiful face as only the Kashmiris can have. glimps38

    In my memory, I am standing with Masto. Of course there is nobody with whom I would rather stand. After Masto, with anybody else it would be poor, bound to be.

    That man was really rich in every cell of his being, and in every fiber of his vast net of relationships that he slowly made me aware of. He never introduced me to the whole; that was not possible. I was in a hurry to do what I call not-doing. He was in a hurry to do what he called his responsibility towards me, as he had promised Pagal Baba. We were both in a hurry, so as much as he wanted to he could not make all his relationships available to me. There were other reasons also.

    He was a traditional sannyasin--at least on the surface, but I knew him underneath. He was not traditional, but only pretending to be because the crowds wanted that pretense. And only today can I understand how much he must have suffered. I have never suffered like that because I simply refused to pretend.

    You cannot believe, but thousands of people were expecting from me something of their own imaginations. I had nothing to do with it. The Hindus, among my millions of followers--I am talking about the days before I started my work--they believed that I was Kalki. Kalki is the Hindu avatara, the last.

    I have to explain it a little, because it will help you to understand many things. In India, the ancient Hindus believed in only ten incarnations of God. Naturally--those were the days when people used to count on their fingers--ten was the ultimate. You could not go beyond ten; you had to begin again from one. That's why the Hindus believed that each cycle of existence has ten avataras. The word 'avatara' means literally "descending of the divine." Ten, because after the tenth, one cycle, or circle, ends. Another immediately begins, but then there is again a first avatara, and the story continues up to the tenth...

    Kalki is the tenth and the last Hindu incarnation of God. After him the world ends--and of course begins again, just as you demolish a house made of playing cards, then start afresh. glimps40

    Masto was a king--not a playing-card king, not even a king of England, but a real king. You could see. Nothing else was needed to prove it. It is strange that he was the first person to call me "the Blessed One," Bhagwan.

    When he said it, I said to him, "Masto, have you also gone as mad as Pagal Baba, or even more?"

    He said, "From this moment, remember, I will not call you other than what I have just called you. Please," he said, "let me be the first, because thousands will call you 'the Blessed One.' Poor Masto should at least be allowed to be the first. At least let me have that prestige."

    We hugged each other, and cried together. That was our last meeting; just the day before I had had the experience (of enlightenment). It was 22nd March, 1953, that we hugged each other without knowing that this was going to be our last meeting. Perhaps he knew, but I was not aware of it. He told me this with tears in his beautiful eyes....

    But Masto looked like a god who had come to earth. I loved him--without any reason of course, because love cannot have any reason. I still love him. I don't know whether he is alive or not, because on 22nd March, 1953 he disappeared. He just told me he was going to the Himalayas.

    He said, "My responsibility is fulfilled as far as I had promised Pagal Baba. Now you are what you potentially were. Now I am no longer needed."

    I said, "No, Masto, I will need you still, for other reasons."

    He said, "No. You will find ways for everything that you require. But I cannot wait."

    Since then, once in a while I used to hear--perhaps from someone coming from the Himalayas, a sannyasin, a bhikkhu--that Masto was in Kalimpong, or that he was in Nainital, or here or there, but he never came back from the Himalayas. I asked everybody who was going to the Himalayas, "If you come across this man. " But it was difficult, because he was

    very reluctant to be photographed. glimps32

    Osho’s experiences leading to Enlightenment

    Buddha says, 'Fortunate is the man who has found a Master.'

    I myself was not as fortunate as you are; I was working without a Master. I searched and I could not find one. It was not that I had not searched, I had searched long enough, but I could not find one. It is very rare to find a Master, rare to find a being who has become a non-being, rare to find a presence who is almost an absence, rare to find a man who Is simply a door to the divine, an open door to the divine which will not hinder you, through which you can pass. It is very difficult .

    The Sikhs call their temple the gurudwara, the door of the Master. That is exactly what the Master is--the door. Jesus says again and again, 'I am the gate, I am the way, I am the truth. Come follow me, pass through me. And unless you pass through me you will not be able to reach.'

    Yes, sometimes it happens that a person has to work without a Master. If the Master is not available then one has to work without a Master, but then the journey is very hazardous.

    For one year I was in the state.... For one year it was almost impossible to know what was happening. For one year continuously it was even difficult to keep myself alive. Just to keep myself alive was a very difficult thing--because all appetite disappeared. Days would pass and I would not feel any hunger, days would pass and I would not feel any thirst. I had to force myself to eat, force myself to drink. The body was so non-existential that I had to hurt myself to feel that I was still in the body. I had to knock my head against the wall to feel whether my head was still there or not. Only when it hurt would I be a little in the body.

    Every morning and every evening I would run for five to eight miles. People used to think that I was mad. Why was I running so much? Sixteen miles a day! It was just to feel myself, to feel that I still was, not to lose contact with myself--just to wait until my eyes became attuned to the new that was happening.

    And I had to keep myself close to myself. I would not talk to anybody because everything had become so inconsistent that even to formulate one sentence was difficult. In the middle of the sentence I would forget what I was saying in the middle of the way I would forget where I was going. Then I would have to come back. I would read a book--I would read fifty pages--and then suddenly I would remember, 'What am I reading? I don't remember at all.'

    My situation was such:

    The door of the psychiatrist's office burst open and a man rushed in.

    'Doctor!' he cried. 'You've got to help me. I'm sure I'm losing my mind. I can't remember anything--what happened a year ago, or even what happened yesterday. I must be going crazy!'

    'Hmmmmmmm,' pondered the headshrinker. 'Just when did you first become aware of this problem?'

    The man looked puzzled, 'What problem?'

    This was my situation! Even to complete a full sentence was difficult. I had to keep myself shut in my room. I made it a point not to talk, not to say anything, because to say anything was to say that I was mad.

    For one year it persisted. I would simply lie on the floor and look at the ceiling and count from one to a hundred then back from a hundred to one. Just to remain capable of counting was at least something. Again and again I would forget. It took one year for me to gain a focus again, to have a perspective.

    It happened. It was a miracle. But it was difficult. There was nobody to support me, there was nobody to say where I was going and what was happening. In fact, everybody was against it my teachers, my friends, my well-wishers. All were against it. But they could not do anything, they could only condemn, they could only ask what I was doing.

    I was not doing anything! Now it was beyond me; it was happening. I had done something, unknowingly I had knocked at the door, now the door had opened. I had been meditating for many years, just sitting silently doing nothing, and by and by I started getting into that space, that heartspace, where you are and you are not doing anything, you are simply there, a presence, a watcher.

    You are not even a watcher because you are not watching--you are just a presence. Words are not adequate because whatsoever word is used it seems as if it is being done. No, I was not doing it. I was simply lying, sitting, walking--deep down there was no doer. I had lost all ambition; there was no desire to be anybody, no desire to reach anywhere--not even God, not even nirvana. The Buddha-disease had completely disappeared. I was simply thrown to myself.

    It was an emptiness and emptiness drives one crazy. But emptiness is the only door to God. That means that only those who are ready to go mad ever attain, nobody else. tao209

    I have been looking for the door to enlightenment as long as I remember--from my very childhood. I must have carried that idea from my past life, because I don't remember a single day in my childhood in this life that I was not looking for it.

    And as far as my craziness is concerned, naturally I was thought crazy by everybody. I never played with any children. I never could find any way to communicate with the children of my own age. To me they looked stupid, doing all kinds of idiotic things. I never joined any football team, volleyball team, hockey team. Of course, they all thought me crazy. And as far as I was concerned, as I grew I started looking at the whole world as crazy.

    In the last year, when I was twenty-one, it was a time of nervous breakdown and breakthrough. Naturally, those who loved me, my family, my friends, my professors, could understand a little bit what was going on in me--why I was so different from other children, why I would go on sitting for hours with closed eyes, why I sat by the bank of the river and went on looking at the sky for hours, sometimes for the whole night. Naturally, the people who could not understand such things--and I did not expect them to understand--thought me mad.

    In my own home I had become almost absent....

    By and by they stopped asking me anything, and slowly slowly they started feeling as if I were not there. And I loved it, the way I had become a nothingness, a nobody, an absence. That one year was tremendous. I was surrounded with nothingness, emptiness. I had lost all contact with the world. If they reminded me to take a bath, I would go on taking the bath for hours. Then they had to knock on the door: "Now come out of the bathroom. You have taken enough bath for one month. Just come out." If they reminded me to eat, I ate; otherwise, days would pass and I would not eat. Not that I was fasting--I had no idea about eating or fasting. My whole concern was to go deeper and deeper into myself. And the door was so magnetic, the pull was so immense--like what physicists now call black holes.

    They say there are black holes in existence. If a star comes by chance to a black hole it is pulled into the black hole; there is no way to resist that pull, and to go into the black hole is to go into destruction. We don't know what happens on the other side. My idea, for which some physicist has to find evidence, is that the black hole on this side is a white hole on the other side. The hole cannot be just one side; it is a tunnel.

    I have experienced it in myself. Perhaps on a bigger scale the same happens in the universe. The star dies; as far as we can see, it disappears. But every moment new stars are being born. From where? Where is their womb? It is simple arithmetic that the black hole was just a womb--the old disappeared into it and the new is born. This I have experienced in myself--I am not a physicist. That one year of tremendous pull made me farther and farther away from people, so much so that I would not recognize my own mother, I might not recognize my own father; so far that there were times I forgot my own name. I tried hard, but there was no way to find what my name used to be.

    Naturally, to everybody that one year I was mad. But to me that madness became meditation, and the peak of that madness opened the door. I passed through it. I am now beyond enlightenment--on the other side of the door. last120

    I was taken to a vaidya to a physician. In fact, I was taken to many doctors and to many physicians but only one ayurvedic vaidya told my father, "He is not ill. Don't waste your time." Of course, they were dragging me from one place to another. And many people would give me medicines and I would tell my father, "Why are you worried? I am perfectly okay." But nobody would believe what I was saying. They would say, "You keep quiet. You just take the medicine. What is wrong in it?" So I used to take all sorts of medicines.

    There was only one vaidya who was a man of insight--his name was Pundit Bhaghirath Prasad. That old man has gone but he was a rare man of insight. He looked at me and he

    said, "He is not ill." And he started crying and said, "I have been searching for this state myself. He is fortunate. In this life I have missed this state. Don't take him to anybody. He is reaching home." And he cried tears of happiness.

    He was a seeker. He had been searching all over the country from this end to that. His whole life was a search and enquiry. He had some idea of what it was about. He became my protector--my protector against the doctors and other physicians. He said to my father, "You leave it to me. I will take care." He never gave me any medicine. When my father insisted, he just gave me sugar pills and told me, "These are sugar pills. Just to console them you can take them. They will not harm, they will not help. In fact, there is no help possible." tao209

    In my university days, and people thought that I was crazy. Suddenly I would stop, and then I would remain in that spot for half an hour, an hour, unless I started enjoying walking again. My professors were so afraid that when there were examinations they would put me in a car and take me to the university hall. They would leave me at the door and wait there: had I reached to my desk or not? If I was taking my bath and suddenly I realized that I was not enjoying it, I would stop. What is the point then? If I was eating and I recognized suddenly that I was not enjoying, then I would stop....

    And, by and by, it became a key. I suddenly recognized that whenever you are enjoying something, you are centered. Enjoyment is just the sound of being centered. Whenever you are not enjoying something, you are off-center. Then don't force it; there is no need. If people think you crazy, let them think you crazy. Within a few days you will, by your own experience, find how you were missing yourself. You were doing a thousand and one things which you never enjoyed, and still you were doing them because you were taught to. You were just fulfilling your duties. trans404

    I used to go for a morning walk, and I used to pass a beautiful house every day--that was my route. And one day, when I was coming back, the sun was just shining on my face; I was perspiring--I had gone for four, five miles, and just...I could not move from that place. I must have been eighteen or seventeen. Something happened between the sun and the beautiful morning, that I simply forgot that I have to go home. I simply forgot that I am. I was simply standing there.

    But the man who owned the house, he has been watching me for almost a year--that I come and go by the side of the house; today, what has happened? I am simply frozen. But frozen in such ecstasy!

    He came and shook me, and it was like coming down from a very far away place, rushing into my body. He said, "What has happened?"

    I said, "That's what I was going to ask you. Something certainly happened, and something that I would like to happen forever. I was not. You unnecessarily got worried, shook me, and brought me back. I had moved into some space which was absolutely new to me--and it was pure isness."

    Anything can do, it seems that just your preparedness, knowingly or unknowingly, your closeness to the point where the phenomenon can be triggered. But this kind of experience

    is not within your power. It happens to you like lightning. trans12

    It happened once with me, many years ago. I used to get up at 3 a.m. and go for a walk. It was a lovely night and the roadside was thickly covered by clusters of bamboo groves. There was a slight opening at one point, otherwise it was covered all the way along. I used to run straight from one end to the other of that stretch one way and then run facing backwards the other way. In an hour--from 3 a.m. to 4 a.m.--I would do my exercise there. One day a weird thing happened. While I was running backwards and still under the bamboo-shaded area, a man--a milkman--was approaching me with all his empty containers on his way to collect milk from some dairy. Then suddenly as I emerged from the shaded area--it was a moonlit night-- he could see me all of a sudden. A moment before I was not visible, so all of a sudden. and

    running backwards! Only ghosts are known to run backwards!

    That milkman threw the empty containers away and ran off. There was something odd about the way he ran off. I had no idea he had become so scared of me, so I ran after him to help. Now he ran for his life! The faster I ran after him, out of concern, calling him to stop, the more speed he was gaining. I had never before seen anyone run like that! Then I had an inkling that perhaps I was the only other person around here and he had become scared of me.

    Hearing the noise of the falling containers and running feet, a man in the nearby hotel woke up. I went to him and asked him if he knew what had happened. He said, "If you are asking me, I know that you run backwards here every day, but still I get scared sometimes. That man must have been new on this road."

    I said, "Keep these containers with you, maybe the man will return in the morning." He has not returned even now! Whenever I have passed by that hotel again, I have inquired if that man has ever returned. He never came back.

    Now there is no way of telling that man that what he had seen was 'almost false'. There was no ghost there, but he managed to see it! For him the ghost was a complete reality, otherwise he would not have disappeared for that long a time. That man must have had some past experience that he imposed on the scene.

    What really is is not what we are seeing; we are seeing what our eyes are showing us. Our mind is imposing things each moment and we are seeing who knows what, and it certainly is not out there in the world.

    This whole world is the extension of our mind. What we see is projected by us. First we project and then we see. First we project a snake in a rope, then we see it and run away. This whole world is like that. finger07

    For ten years I used to run eight miles every morning and eight miles every evening--from I947 to I957. It was a regular thing. And I came to experience many, many things through running. At sixteen miles per day I would have encircled the world seven times in those ten years. After you run the second or third mile a moment comes when things start flowing and you are no longer in the head, you become your body, you are the body. You start functioning as an alive being--as trees function, as animals function. You become a tiger or a peacock or a wolf. You forget all head. The university is forgotten, the degrees are forgotten, you don't know a thing, you simply are.

    In fact, by and by, after three or four miles, you cannot conceive of yourself as a head. Totality arises. Plato is forgotten, Freud has disappeared, all divisions disappear--because they were on the surface--and deep down your unity starts asserting itself.

    Running against the wind in the early morning when things are fresh and the whole existence is in a new joy, is bathed in a new delight of the new day, and everything is fresh and young, the past has disappeared, everything has come out of deep rest in the night, everything is innocent, primitive--suddenly even the runner disappears. There is only running. There is no body running, there is only running. And by and by you see that a dance arises with the wind, with the sky, with the sun rays coming, with the trees, with the earth. You are dancing. You start feeling the pulse of the Universe. That is sexual. Swimming in the river is sexual. Copulating is not the only sexual thing; anything where your body pulsates totally, with no inhibitions, is sexual.

    So when I use the word 'sexual' I mean this experience of totality. Genitality is only one of the functions of sexuality. It has become too important because we have forgotten the total function of sexuality. In fact, your so-called mahatmas have made you very, very genital. The whole blame falls on your saints and mahatmas--they are the culprits, the criminals. They have never told you what real sexuality is.

    By and by sexuality has become confined to the genitals; it has become local, it is no longer total. Local genitality is ugly because at the most it can give you a relief; it can never give you orgasm. Ejaculation is not orgasm, all ejaculations are not orgasmic and each orgasm is not a peak experience. Ejaculation is genital, orgasm is sexual and a peak experience is spiritual. When sexuality is confined to the genitals you can have only relief; you simply lose energy, you don't gain anything. It is simply stupid. It is just like the relief that comes out of a good sneeze, not more than that.

    It has no orgasm because your total body does not pulsate. You are not in a dance, you don't participate with your whole, it is not holy. It is very partial and the partial can never be orgasmic because orgasm is possible only when the total organism is involved. When you pulsate from your toe to your head, when every fibre of your being pulsates, when all cells of your body dance, when there is a great orchestra inside you, when everything is dancing--

    then there is orgasm. But every orgasm is not a peak experience either. When you are pulsating totally inside, it is an orgasm. When your totality participates with the totality of existence it is a peak experience. And people have decided on ejaculation, they have forgotten orgasm and they have completely forgotten the peak experience. They don't know what it is.

    And because they cannot attain the higher, they are confined to the lower. When you can attain the higher, when you can attain the better, naturally the lower starts disappearing on its own accord. If you understand me...sex will be transformed, but not sexuality. You will become more sexual. As sex disappears you will become more sexual. Where will sex go? It will become your sexuality. You will become more sensuous. You will live with more intensity, with more flame; you will live like a great wave. These tiny waves will disappear. You will become a storm, you will become a great wind that can shake the trees and the mountains. You will be a tide, a flood. Your candle will burn at both ends together, simultaneously.

    And in that moment--even if you are allowed to live for only one moment, that's more than enough--you have the taste of eternity. parad107

    Let me tell you an incredible experience I had. It has just occurred to me; I have never told it before. About seventeen or eighteen years ago I used to meditate until late at night sitting in the top of a tree.

    I have often felt the body has a greater influence over you if you meditate sitting on the ground. The body is made of earth, and the forces of the body work very powerfully if one meditates sitting on the ground. All this talk of the yogis moving up to the higher elevations-- to the mountains, to the Himalayas--is not without reason; it's very scientific. The greater the distance between the body and the earth, the lesser the pull of the earthly element on the body.

    So I used to meditate every night sitting in a tree.

    One night...I don't know when I became immersed in deep meditation, and I don't know at what point my body fell from the tree, but when it did, I looked with a start to see what had happened.

    I was still in the tree, but the body had fallen below. It's difficult to say how I felt at that time. I was still sitting in the tree and the body was below. Only a single silver cord connected me with the navel of my body--a very shiny silver cord. What would happen next was beyond my comprehension. How would I return to my body?

    I don't know how long this state lasted, but it was an exceptional experience. For the first time I saw my body from outside, and from that very day on the body ceased to exist. Since then I am finished with death, because I came to see another body different from this one--I came to experience the subtle body. It's difficult to say how long this experience lasted.

    With the breaking of dawn, two women from the nearby village passed, carrying milk pots on their heads. As they approached the tree they saw my body lying there. They came and sat next to the body. I was watching all this from above. It seems the women took the body to be dead. They placed their hands on my head, and in a moment, as if by a powerful force of attraction, I came back into the body and my eyes opened.

    At that point I experienced something else too. I felt that a woman can create a chemical change in a man's body, and so can a man in a woman's body. I also wondered how the touch of that woman caused my return to the body. Subsequently, I had many more experiences of this kind. They explained why the tantrikas of India, who experimented extensively with samadhi and death, had linked themselves with women too.

    During intensive experiences of samadhi, man's luminous body, his subtle body, cannot return without a woman's help if it has come out of the physical body. Similarly, a woman's luminous, subtle body, cannot be brought back without a man's assistance. As the male and female bodies connect, an electrical circuit is completed and the consciousness that has gone out returns swiftly to the body.

    Following this event, I consistently had the same kind of experience about six times in six months. And in those six months I felt I had lost at least ten years off my life. If I were to live up to seventy, now I can only live up to sixty. I went through some strange experiences in six months--even the hair on my chest turned white. I couldn't comprehend what was happening.

    It occurred to me, however, that the connection between this body and that body had ruptured, had been interrupted, that the adjustment, the harmony that had existed between the two, had broken down. What also occurred to me was that the reason for Shankaracharya dying at the age of thirty-three and Vivekananda dying at the age of thirty-six was something else. It becomes difficult to live once the connection between the two bodies breaks abruptly. This explained why Ramakrishna was besieged with illnesses and Ramana died of cancer. The cause was not physical; rather, the breaking of the adjustment between their physical and subtle bodies was responsible for it.

    It is generally believed that yogis are healthy people, but the truth is completely the opposite. The truth is, yogis have always been ill, and have died at early ages. The sole reason for this is that the necessary adjustment between the two bodies becomes interrupted. Once the subtle body comes out of the physical body it never reenters fully and the adjustment is never completely restored. But then it is not needed. There is no reason for it; it has no meaning.

    With the use of will power, simply with will power, the energy can be drawn inside--just the thought, the feeling, "I want to turn in, I want to go back in, I want to return within, I want to come back in." Were you to have such an intense longing, such a powerful emotion; if your whole being were to fill with a passionate, intense desire to return to your center; if your entire body were to pulsate with this feeling, someday it can happen--you will instantly return to your core and, for the first time, see your body from within.

    When yoga talks about thousands of arteries and veins, it is not from the point of view of physiology. Yogis have nothing to do with physiology. These have been known from within; hence, when one looks today one wonders where these arteries and veins are. Where are the seven chakras, the centers within the body that yoga talks about? They are nowhere in the body. We can't find them because we are looking at the body from outside.

    There is one other way to observe the body--from within, through the inner physiology. That's a subtle physiology. The nerves, veins and centers of the body known through that inner physiology are all totally different. You won't find them anywhere in this physical body. These centers are the contact fields between this body and the inner soul, the meeting points for both.

    The biggest meeting point is the navel. You may have noticed, if you suddenly get into an accident driving a car, the navel will be the first to feel the impact. The navel will become disordered at once, because here the contact field between the body and the soul is the deepest of all. Seeing death, this center will be the first to become disturbed. As soon as death appears, the navel will be disrupted in relation to the body's center. There is an internal arrangement of the body which has resulted from the contact between this body and the inner body. The chakras are their contact fields.

    So obviously, to know the body from within is to know a totally different kind of world altogether, a world we know absolutely nothing about. Medical science knows nothing about it, and won't for some time. Once you experience that the body is separate from you, you are finished with death. You come to know there is no death. And then you can actually come out of the body and look at it yourself from outside.

    Questions relating to life and death are not matters of philosophical or metaphysical thought. Those who think about these things never accomplish anything. What I am talking about is an existential approach. It can be known that "I am life;" it can be known that "I am not going to die." One can live this experience, one can enter into it. now08

    I am reminded of a dream I have never been able to forget.

    In this dream, which came to me a number of times, there was a long ladder with its upper rungs completely lost in the clouds. It seemed to be a ladder that led to the sky. Urged by an irrepressible desire to reach the sky, I began to climb. But it was very difficult; each rung required great effort. My breathing grew strained and perspiration poured from my forehead. But my desire to reach the sky was so great that I went on climbing. Soon there was a feeling of suffocation and it seemed as if my heart would give out. But all at once I realized that I was not the only climber, that mine was not the only ladder. There was an infinite number of ladders and endless numbers of people were climbing upwards. I experienced a surge of great rivalry and I began to climb even faster. This mad race, this using of all our strength to keep climbing continued until it eventually faded into the end of the dream.

    That is always the same.

    I finally reached the last rung. There is no rung beyond, and turning around, I see that there is no ladder either. And then the fall, the descent from that great height begins. It is even more painful that the climb. Death seems inevitable. And sure enough, it is my death. And the shock of that death invariably awakens me.

    But that dream shows me a great truth, and since the first time I have had it life has seemed nothing more to me than an extension of that dream. In every dream is there not some kind of vision of the mad rush in which mankind is involved? Doesn't every mad scramble end in death? But then, ask yourself what "death" means. Doesn't it just mean there is no higher rung on the ladder? Death is the end of rushing. It is an end to the future; it is the impossibility of any further possibilities. The rushing, racing mind leads a man to great heights, and what is death but the fall from those heights?

    Whenever there is a mad race of any kind, death invariably steps in. It makes no difference whether the goal is wealth or religion or enjoyment or renunciation. Wherever there is rushing there is dreaming, but where there is no rushing, racing mind, there is truth. And there is life too--the life that has no death. long05

    The desire to be on the peaks is a wrong desire--all desires as such are wrong, and religious desires are far more wrong than any other desires for the simple reason that other desires can be fulfilled. Of course, by their fulfillment you will not go beyond frustration; fulfilled or not fulfilled, frustration is inevitable. If your desire is fulfilled you will be frustrated--in fact, more so, because now you will see you were chasing a shadow; you have got it and there is nothing in it. If your desire is not fulfilled you will be frustrated, because your whole life is wasted and you have not been able to fulfill a single desire. All your hopes are shattered.

    Hopes are bound to be shattered. To hope is to hanker for hopelessness, to desire is to breed frustration. But in the worldly things at least there is a possibility of succeeding, failing, attaining, not attaining. But in spiritual matters there is no question of attainment at all because the goose is out! Nothing can be done about it, it is already out. The moment you start enjoying your valley you are on the peak--there is no other peak!

    One day I suddenly decided enough is enough. I dropped the idea of the peaks and started enjoying the valley, and a miracle I saw: the valley disappeared. In fact, from the very beginning there had been no valley, I was always on the peak, but because I was searching for a peak I could not see where I was.

    Your eyes are focused far away, hence you miss the obvious. It is here, and your mind is there, arrowed into the blue sky. And the reality surrounds you: it is closer than your very heartbeat, it is closer than your breathing, it is closer than the circulation of your blood, it is closer than your very marrow, it is closer than your very consciousness. It is your very core, your very being! goose03

    I used to ask myself, "Who am I?" It is impossible to count how many days and nights I passed in this query. The intellect gave answers heard from others, or born of conditioning. All of them were borrowed, lifeless. They brought no contentment. They resonated a little at

    the surface, and then disappeared. The inner being was not touched by them. No echo of them was heard in the depths. There were many answers to the question, but none was correct. And I was untouched by them. They could not rise to the level of the question.

    Then I saw that the question came from the center but the replies touched only the periphery. The question was mine, but the answers came from outside; the question arose from my innermost being, the replies were imposed from outside. This insight became a revolution. A new dimension was revealed.

    The responses of the intellect were meaningless. They had no relevance to the problem. An illusion had shattered. And what a relief it was!

    It seemed as if a closed door had been flung open, filling the darkness with light. The intellect had been providing the answers--that was the mistake. Because of these false answers, the real answer could not arise. Some truth was struggling to surface. In the depths of consciousness some seed was seeking the way to break open the ground in order to reach the light. Intellect was the obstruction.

    When this was made plain, the answers began to subside. Knowledge acquired from outside began to evaporate. The question went ever deeper. I did not do anything, only kept on watching.

    Something novel was happening. I was speechless. What was there to do? I was, at the most, simply a witness. The reactions of the periphery were fading, perishing, becoming nonexistent. The center now began to resonate more fully.

    "Who am I?" My entire being was throbbing with this thirst.

    What a violent storm it was! Every breath quaked and trembled in it.

    "Who am I?" - like an arrow, the question pierced through everything and moved within.

    I remember--what an acute thirst it was! My very life had turned into thirst. Everything was burning. And like a flame of fire the question stood forth, "Who am I?"

    The surprise was that the intellect was completely silent. The incessant flow of thoughts had stopped. What had happened? The periphery was absolutely still. There were no thoughts, no conditionings of the past.

    Only I was there--and there was the question too. No, no-- I myself was the question.

    And then the explosion. In a moment, everything was transformed. The question had dropped. The answer had come from some unknown dimension.

    Truth is attained through a sudden explosion, not gradually.

    It cannot be compelled to appear. It comes.

    Emptiness is the solution, not words. Becoming answerless is the answer.

    Someone asked yesterday--and someone or the other asks every day--"What is the answer?" I say, "If I mention it, it is meaningless. Its meaning lies in realizing it oneself." sdwisd01

    I tell you from my own experience that there is no easier path than merging with one's own self. The only thing one has to do is stop seeking for the support of anything on the surface of the mind. By catching hold of thoughts you cannot drown and because of their support you remain on the surface.

    We are in the habit of catching hold of thoughts. As soon as one thought passes on we catch hold of another--but we never enter the gap between two successive thoughts. This gap itself is the channel to drowning in the depths. Do not move in thoughts--go deep down between them in the gaps.

    How can this be done? It can be done by awareness, by observing the stream of thoughts. Just as a man standing on the side of a road watches the people passing by, you should observe your thoughts. They are simply pedestrians, passing by on the road of the mind within you. Just watch them. Don't form judgment about any of them. If you can observe them with detachment, the fist that has been gripping them opens automatically and you will find yourself standing, not in thoughts, but in the interval, in the gap between them. But the gap has no foundation so it isn't possible just to stand there. Simply by being there you drown.

    And this drowning itself is the real support because it is through this that you reach the being you really are. One who seeks support in the realm of thoughts is really suspended in the air without support--but he who throws away all crutches attains the support of his own self. pway07

    A meditator has to remember not to struggle with the thoughts. If you want to win, don't fight. That is a simple rule of thumb. If you want to win, simply don't fight. The thoughts will be coming as usual. You just watch, hiding behind your blanket; let them come and go. Just don't get involved with them.

    The whole question is of not getting involved in any way--appreciation or condemnation, any judgment, bad or good. Don't say anything, just remain absolutely aloof and allow the mind to move in its routine way. If you can manage...and this has been managed by thousands of buddhas, so there is not a problem. And when I say this can be managed, I am saying it on my own authority. I don't have any other authority.

    I have fought and have tortured myself with fighting and I have known the whole split that creates a constant misery and tension. Finally seeing the point that victory is impossible, I simply dropped out of the fight. I allowed the thoughts to move as they want; I am no longer interested.

    And this is a miracle, that if you are not interested, thoughts start coming less. When you are utterly uninterested, they stop coming. And a state of no-thought, without any fight, is the greatest peace one has ever known. This is what we are calling the empty heart of the buddha. empti03

    This mind is amazing. It comes to be experienced like an onion. One day, seeing an onion, I was reminded of this resemblance. I was peeling the onion; I went on peeling layer after layer, and finally nothing remained of it. First thick rough layers, then soft smooth layers, and then nothing.

    Thus is the mind also. You go on peeling off, first gross layers, then subtle layers, and then remains an emptiness. Thoughts, passions and ego, and then nothing at all, just emptiness. It is the uncovering of this emptiness that I call meditation. This emptiness is our true self. That which ultimately remains is the self-form. Call it the self, call it the no-self, words do not mean anything. Where there is no thought, passion, or ego, is that which is.

    Hume has said, "Whenever I dive into myself I do not meet any 'I' there. I come across either some thought or some passion or some memory, but never across myself." This is right--but Hume turns back from the layers only, and that is the mistake. Had he gone a little deeper he would have reached the place where there is nothing to come across, and that is the true self. Where there remains nothing to come across is that which I am. Everything is based in that emptiness. But if somebody turns back from the very surface, no acquaintance with it takes place.

    On the surface is the world, at the center is the self. On the surface is everything, at the center is nothing-ness, the void. sdwisd03

    On my search I found no greater scripture than silence. When I had dug through all the scriptures I realized how futile they all were and that silence was the only thing that had any point to it whatsoever. long03

    I remember the days when my mind was in darkness, when nothing was clear inside me at all. One thing in particular I recall about those days was that I did not feel love for anyone, I did not even love myself.

    But when I came to the experience of meditation, I felt as though a million dormant springs of love had suddenly begun to bubble up in me. This love was not focused, not directed to anyone in particular, it was just a flow, fluid and forceful. It flowed from me as light streams from a lamp, as fragrance pours from flowers. In the wonderful moment of my awakening I realized that love was the real manifestation of my nature, of man's nature.

    Love has no direction; it is not aimed at anyone. Love is a manifestation of the soul, of one's self.

    Before this experience happened to me I believed love meant being attached to someone. Now I realize that love and attachment are two completely different things. Attachment is the

    absence of love. Attachment is the opposite of hatred, and hatred it can easily become. They are a pair, attachment and hatred. They are mutually interchangeable.

    The opposite of hatred is not love. Not at all. And love is quite different from attachment too. Love is a completely new dimension. It is the absence of both attachment and hatred, yet it is not negative. Love is the positive existence of some higher power. This power, this energy, flows from the self towards all things--not because it is attracted by them, but because love is emitted by the self. Because love is the perfume of the self. long06

    Osho’s enlightenment

    You ask me: What happened when you became enlightened?

    I laughed, a real uproarious laugh, seeing the whole absurdity of trying to be enlightened. The whole thing is ridiculous because we are born enlightened, and to try for something that is already the case is the most absurd thing. If you already have it, you cannot achieve it; only those things can be achieved which you don't have, which are not intrinsic parts of your being. But enlightenment is your very nature.

    I had struggled for it for many lives--it had been the only target for many many lives. And I had done everything that is possible to do to attain it, but I had always failed. It was bound to be so--because it cannot be an attainment. It is your nature, so how can it be your attainment? It cannot be made an ambition.

    Mind is ambitious--ambitious for money, for power, for prestige. And then one day, when it gets fed up with all these extrovert activities, it becomes ambitious for enlightenment, for liberation, for nirvana, for God. But the same ambition has come back; only the object he changed. First the object was outside, now the object is inside. But your attitude, your approach has not changed; you are the same person in the same rut, in the same routine.

    "The day I became enlightened" simply means the day I realized that there is nothing to achieve, there is nowhere to go, there is nothing to be done. We are already divine and we are already perfect--as we are. No improvement is needed, no improvement at all. God never creates anybody imperfect. Even if you come across an imperfect man, you will see that his imperfection is perfect. God never creates any imperfect thing.

    I have heard about a Zen Master Bokuju who was telling this truth to his disciples, that all is perfect. A man stood up--very old, a hunchback--and he said, "What about me? I am a

    hunchback. What do you say about me?" Bokuju said, "I have never seen such a perfect hunchback in my life."

    When I say "the day I achieved enlightenment," I am using wrong language--because there is no other language, because our language is created by us. It consists of the words "achievement," "attainment," "goals," "improvement" "progress," "evolution." Our languages are not created by the enlightened people; and in fact they cannot create it even if they want to because enlightenment happens in silence. How can you bring that silence into words? And whatsoever you do, the words are going to destroy something of that silence.

    Lao Tzu says: The moment truth is asserted it becomes false. There is no way to communicate truth. But language has to be used; there is no other way. So we always have to use the language with the condition that it cannot be adequate to the experience. Hence I say "the day I achieved my enlightenment." It is neither an achievement nor mine.

    [At this point there is a brief power failure: no light, no sound.]

    Yes, it happens like that! Out of nowhere suddenly the darkness, suddenly the light, and you cannot do anything. You can just watch.

    I laughed that day because of all my stupid ridiculous efforts to attain it. I laughed on that day at myself, and I laughed on that day at the whole of humanity, because everybody is trying to achieve, everybody is trying to reach, everybody is trying to improve.

    To me it happened in a state of total relaxation--it always happens in that state. I had tried everything. And then, seeing the futility of all effort, I dropped...I dropped the whole project, I forgot all about it. For seven days I lived as ordinarily as possible.

    The people I used to live with were very much surprised, because this was the first time they had seen me live just an ordinary life. Otherwise my whole life was a perfect discipline.

    For two years I had lived with that family, and they had known that I would get up at three o'clock in the morning, then I would go for a long four- or five-mile walk or run, and then I would take a bath in the river. Everything was absolutely routine. Even if I had a fever or I was ill, there was no difference: I would simply go on the same way.

    They had known me to sit in meditation for hours. Up to that day I had not eaten many things. I would not drink tea, coffee, I had a strict discipline about what to eat, what not to eat. And exactly at nine o'clock I would go to bed. Even if somebody was sitting there, I would simply say "Goodbye" and I would go to my bed. The family with whom I used to live, they would inform the person that "Now you can go. He has gone to sleep." I would not even waste a single moment in saying, "Now it is time for me to go to sleep."

    When I relaxed for seven days, when I dropped the whole thing and when on the first day I drank tea in the morning and woke up at nine o'clock in the morning, the family was puzzled. They said, "What has happened? Have you fallen?" They used to think of me as a great yogi.

    One picture of those days still exists. I used to use only one single piece of cloth and that was all. In the day I would cover my body with it, in the night I would use it as a blanket to cover myself. I slept on a bamboo mat. That was my whole comfort--that blanket, that bamboo mat. I had nothing--no other possessions.

    They were puzzled when I woke up at nine. They said, "Something is wrong. Are you very ill, seriously ill?"

    I said, "No, I am not seriously ill. I have been ill for many years, now I am perfectly healthy. Now I will wake up only when sleep leaves me, and I will go to sleep only when sleep comes to me. I am no longer going to be a slave to the clock. I will eat whatsoever my body feels like eating, and I will drink whatsoever I feel like drinking."

    They could not believe it. They said, "Can you even drink beer?" I said, "Bring it!"

    That was the first day I tasted beer. They could not believe their eyes. They said, "You have completely gone down. You have become completely unspiritual. What are you doing?"

    I said, "Enough is enough." And in seven days I completely forgot the whole project, and I forgot it forever.

    And the seventh day it happened--it happened just out of nowhere. Suddenly all was light; and I was not doing anything, I was just sitting under a tree resting, enjoying. And when I laughed, the gardener heard the laughter. He used to think that I was a little bit crazy, but he had never seen me laugh in that way. He came running. He said, "What is the matter?"

    I said, "Don't be worried. You know I am crazy--now I have gone completely crazy! I am laughing at myself. Don't feel offended. Just go to sleep." theolo09

    I am reminded of the fateful day of twenty-first March, 1953. For many lives I had been working--working upon myself, struggling, doing whatsoever can be done--and nothing was happening.

    Now I understand why nothing was happening. The very effort was the barrier, the very ladder was preventing, the very urge to seek was the obstacle. Not that one can reach without seeking. Seeking is needed, but then comes a point when seeking has to be dropped. The boat is needed to cross the river but then comes a moment when you have to get out of the boat and forget all about it and leave it behind. Effort is needed, without effort nothing is possible. And also only with effort, nothing is possible.

    Just before twenty-first March, 1953, seven days before, I stopped working on myself. A moment comes when you see the whole futility of effort. You have done all that you can do and nothing is happening. You have done all that is humanly possible. Then what else can you do? In sheer helplessness one drops all search.

    And the day the search stopped, the day I was not seeking for something, the day I was not expecting something to happen, it started happening. A new energy arose--out of nowhere. It was not coming from any source. It was coming from nowhere and everywhere. It was in the trees and in the rocks and the sky and the sun and the air--it was everywhere. And I was seeking so hard, and I was thinking it is very far away. And it was so near and so close.

    Just because I was seeking I had become incapable of seeing the near. Seeking is always for the far, seeking is always for the distant--and it was not distant. I had become far-sighted, I had lost the near-sightedness. The eyes had become focussed on the far away, the horizon, and they had lost the quality to see that which is just close, surrounding you.

    The day effort ceased, I also ceased. Because you cannot exist without effort, and you cannot exist without desire, and you cannot exist without striving.

    The phenomenon of the ego, of the self, is not a thing, it is a process. It is not a substance sitting there inside you; you have to create it each moment. It is like pedalling bicycle. If you pedal it goes on and on, if you don't pedal it stops. It may go a little because of the past momentum, but the moment you stop pedalling, in fact the bicycle starts stopping. It has no more energy, no more power to go anywhere. It is going to fall and collapse.

    The ego exists because we go on pedalling desire, because we go on striving to get something, because we go on jumping ahead of ourselves. That is the very phenomenon of the ego--the jump ahead of yourself, the jump in the future, the jump in the tomorrow. The jump in the non-existential creates the ego. Because it comes out of the non-existential it is like a mirage. It consists only of desire and nothing else. It consists only of thirst and nothing else.

    The ego is not in the present, it is in the future. If you are in the future, then ego seems to be very substantial. If you are in the present the ego is a mirage, it starts disappearing.

    The day I stopped seeking...and it is not right to say that I stopped seeking, better will be to say the day seeking stopped. Let me repeat it: the better way to say it is the day the seeking stopped. Because if I stop it then I am there again. Now stopping becomes my effort, now stopping becomes my desire, and desire goes on existing in a very subtle way.

    You cannot stop desire; you can only understand it. In the very understanding is the stopping of it. Remember, nobody can stop desiring, and the reality happens only when desire stops.

    So this is the dilemma. What to do? Desire is there and Buddhas go on saying desire has to be stopped, and they go on saying in the next breath that you cannot stop desire. So what to do? You put people in a dilemma. They are in desire, certainly. You say it has to be stopped-- okay. And then you say it cannot be stopped. Then what is to be done?

    The desire has to be understood. You can understand it, you can just see the futility of it. A direct perception is needed, an immediate penetration is needed. Look into desire, just see

    what it is, and you will see the falsity of it, and you will see it is non-existential. And desire drops and something drops simultaneously within you.

    Desire and the ego exist in cooperation, they coordinate. The ego cannot exist without desire, the desire cannot exist without the ego. Desire is projected ego, ego is introjected desire. They are together, two aspects of one phenomenon.

    The day desiring stopped, I felt very hopeless and helpless. No hope because no future. Nothing to hope because all hoping has proved futile, it leads nowhere. You go in rounds. It goes on dangling in front of you, it goes on creating new mirages, it goes on calling you, 'Come on, run fast, you will reach.' But howsoever fast you run you never reach.

    That's why Buddha calls it a mirage. It is like the horizon that you see around the earth. It appears but it is not there. If you go it goes on running from you. The faster you run, the faster it moves away. The slower you go, the slower it moves away. But one thing is certain-- the distance between you and the horizon remains absolutely the same. Not even a single inch can you reduce the distance between you and the horizon.

    You cannot reduce the distance between you and your hope. Hope is horizon. You try to bridge yourself with the horizon, with the hope, with a projected desire. The desire is a bridge, a dream bridge--because the horizon exists not, so you cannot make a bridge towards it, you can only dream about the bridge. You cannot be joined with the non-existential.

    The day the desire stopped, the day I looked and realized into it, it simply was futile. I was helpless and hopeless. But that very moment something started happening. The same started happening for which for many lives I was working and it was not happening.

    In your hopelessness is the only hope, and in your desirelessness is your only fulfillment, and in your tremendous helplessness suddenly the whole existence starts helping you.

    It is waiting. When it sees that you are working on your own, it does not interfere. It waits. It can wait infinitely because there is no hurry for it. It is eternity. The moment you are not on your own, the moment you drop, the moment you disappear, the whole existence rushes towards you, enters you. And for the first time things start happening.

    Seven days I lived in a very hopeless and helpless state, but at the same time something was arising. When I say hopeless I don't mean what you mean by the word hopeless. I simply mean there was no hope in me. Hope was absent. I am not saying that I was hopeless and sad. I was happy in fact, I was very tranquil, calm and collected and centered. Hopeless, but in a totally new meaning. There was no hope, so how could there be hopelessness. Both had disappeared.

    The hopelessness was absolute and total. Hope had disappeared and with it its counterpart, hopelessness, had also disappeared. It was a totally new experience--of being without hope. It was not a negative state. I have to use words--but it was not a negative state. It was

    absolutely positive. It was not just absence, a presence was felt. Something was overflowing in me, overflooding me.

    And when I say I was helpless, I don't mean the word in the dictionary-sense. I simply say I was selfless. That's what I mean when I say helpless. I have recognized the fact that I am not, so I cannot depend on myself, so I cannot stand on my own ground--there was no ground underneath. I was in an abyss...bottomless abyss. But there was no fear because there was nothing to protect. There was no fear because there was nobody to be afraid.

    Those seven days were of tremendous transformation, total transformation. And the last day the presence of a totally new energy, a new light and new delight, became so intense that it was almost unbearable--as if I was exploding, as if I was going mad with blissfulness. The new generation in the West has the right word for it--I was blissed out, stoned.

    It was impossible to make any sense out of it, what was happening. It was a very non-sense world--difficult to figure it out, difficult to manage in categories, difficult to use words, languages, explanations. All scriptures appeared dead and all the words that have been used for this experience looked very pale, anaemic. This was so alive. It was like a tidal wave of bliss.

    The whole day was strange, stunning, and it was a shattering experience. The past was disappearing, as if it had never belonged to me, as if I had read about it somewhere, as if I had dreamed about it, as if it was somebody else's story I have heard and somebody told it to me. I was becoming loose from my past, I was being uprooted from my history, I was losing my autobiography. I was becoming a non-being, what Buddha calls anatta. Boundaries were disappearing, distinctions were disappearing.

    Mind was disappearing; it was millions of miles away. It was difficult to catch hold of it, it was rushing farther and farther away, and there was no urge to keep it close. I was simply indifferent about it all. It was okay. There was no urge to remain continuous with the past.

    By the evening it became so difficult to bear it--it was hurting, it was painful. It was like when a woman goes into labour when a child is to be born, and the woman suffers tremendous pain--the birth pangs.

    I used to go to sleep in those days near about twelve or one in the night, but that day it was impossible to remain awake. My eyes were closing, it was difficult to keep them open. Something was very imminent, something was going to happen. It was difficult to say what it was--maybe it is going to be my death--but there was no fear. I was ready for it. Those seven days had been so beautiful that I was ready to die, nothing more was needed. They had been so tremendously blissful, I was so contented, that if death was coming, it was welcome.

    But something was going to happen--something like death, something very drastic, something which will be either a death or a new birth, a crucifixion or a resurrection--but something of tremendous import was around just by the corner. And it was impossible to keep my eyes open. I was drugged.

    I went to sleep near about eight. It was not like sleep. Now I can understand what Patanjali means when he says that sleep and samadhi are similar. Only with one difference--that in samadhi you are fully awake and asleep also. Asleep and awake together, the whole body relaxed, every cell of the body totally relaxed, all functioning relaxed, and yet a light of awareness burns within you...clear, smokeless. You remain alert and yet relaxed, loose but fully awake. The body is in the deepest sleep possible and your consciousness is at its peak. The peak of consciousness and the valley of the body meet.

    I went to sleep. It was a very strange sleep. The body was asleep, I was awake. It was so strange--as if one was torn apart into two directions, two dimensions; as if the polarity has become completely focused, as if I was both the polarities together...the positive and negative were meeting, sleep and awareness were meeting, death and life were meeting. That is the moment when you can say 'the creator and the creation meet.'

    It was weird. For the first time it shocks you to the very roots, it shakes your foundations. You can never be the same after that experience; it brings a new vision to your life, a new quality.

    Near about twelve my eyes suddenly opened--I had not opened them. The sleep was broken by something else. I felt a great presence around me in the room. It was a very small room. I felt a throbbing life all around me, a great vibration--almost like a hurricane, a great storm of light, joy, ecstasy. I was drowning in it.

    It was so tremendously real that everything became unreal. The walls of the room became unreal, the house became unreal, my own body became unreal. Everything was unreal because now there was for the first time reality.

    That's why when Buddha and Shankara say the world is maya, a mirage, it is difficult for us to understand. Because we know only this world, we don't have any comparison. This is the only reality we know. What are these people talking about--this is maya, illusion? This is the only reality. Unless you come to know the really real, their words cannot be understood, their words remain theoretical. They look like hypotheses. Maybe this man is propounding a philosophy--'The world is unreal'.

    When Berkley in the West said that the world is unreal, he was walking with one of his friends, a very logical man; the friend was almost a skeptic. He took a stone from the road and hit Berkley's feet hard. Berkley screamed, blood rushed out, and the skeptic said, 'Now, the world is unreal? You say the world is unreal?--then why did you scream? This stone is unreal?--then why did you scream? Then why are you holding your leg and why are you showing so much pain and anguish on your face. Stop this? It is all unreal.

    Now this type of man cannot understand what Buddha means when he says the world is a mirage. He does not mean that you can pass through the wall. He is not saying this--that you can eat stones and it will make no difference whether you eat bread or stones. He is not saying that.

    He is saying that there is a reality. Once you come to know it, this so-called reality simply pales out, simply becomes unreal. With a higher reality in vision the comparison arises, not otherwise.

    In the dream; the dream is real. You dream every night. Dream is one of the greatest activities that you go on doing. If you live sixty years, twenty years you will sleep and almost ten years you will dream. Ten years in a life--nothing else do you do so much. Ten years of continuous dreaming--just think about it. And every night. And every morning you say it was

    unreal, and again in the night when you dream, dream becomes real.

    In a dream it is so difficult to remember that this is a dream. But in the morning it is so easy. What happens? You are the same person. In the dream there is only one reality. How to compare? How to say it is unreal? Compared to what? It is the only reality. Everything is as unreal as everything else so there is no comparison. In the morning when you open your eyes another reality is there. Now you can say it was all unreal. Compared to this reality, dream becomes unreal.

    There is an awakening--compared to that reality of that awakening, this whole reality becomes unreal.

    That night for the first time I understood the meaning of the word maya. Not that I had not known the word before, not that I was not aware of the meaning of the word. As you are aware, I was also aware of the meaning--but I had never understood it before. How can you understand without experience?

    That night another reality opened its door, another dimension became available. Suddenly it was there, the other reality, the separate reality, the really real, or whatsoever you want to call it--call it god, call it truth, call it dhamma, call it tao, or whatsoever you will. It was nameless. But it was there--so opaque, so transparent, and yet so solid one could have touched it. It was almost suffocating me in that room. It was too much and I was not yet capable of absorbing it.

    A deep urge arose in me to rush out of the room, to go under the sky--it was suffocating me. It was too much! It will kill me! If I had remained a few moments more, it would have suffocated me--it looked like that.

    I rushed out of the room, came out in the street. A great urge was there just to be under the sky with the stars, with the trees, with the earth...to be with nature. And immediately as I came out, the feeling of being suffocated disappeared. It was too small a place for such a big phenomenon. Even the sky is a small place for that big phenomenon. It is bigger than the sky. Even the sky is not the limit for it. But then I felt more at ease.

    I walked towards the nearest garden. It was a totally new walk, as if gravitation had disappeared. I was walking, or I was running, or I was simply flying; it was difficult to decide. There was no gravitation, I was feeling weightless--as if some energy was taking me. I was in the hands of some other energy.

    For the first time I was not alone, for the first time I was no more an individual, for the first time the drop has come and fallen into the ocean. Now the whole ocean was mine, I was the ocean. There was no limitation. A tremendous power arose as if I could do anything whatsoever. I was not there, only the power was there.

    I reached to the garden where I used to go every day. The garden was closed, closed for the night. It was too late, it was almost one o'clock in the night. The gardeners were fast asleep. I had to enter the garden like a thief, I had to climb the gate. But something was pulling me towards the garden. It was not within my capacity to prevent myself. I was just floating.

    That's what I mean when I say again and again 'float with the river, don't push the river'. I was relaxed, I was in a let-go. I was not there. it was there, call it god--god was there.

    I would like to call it it, because god is too human a word, and has become too dirty by too much use, has become too polluted by so many people. Christians, Hindus, Mohammedans, priests and politicians--they all have corrupted the beauty of the word. So let me call it it. It was there and I was just carried away...carried by a tidal wave.

    The moment I entered the garden everything became luminous, it was all over the place--the benediction, the blessedness. I could see the trees for the first time--their green, their life, their very sap running. The whole garden was asleep, the trees were asleep. But I could see the whole garden alive, even the small grass leaves were so beautiful.

    I looked around. One tree was tremendously luminous--the maulshree tree. It attracted me, it pulled me towards itself. I had not chosen it, god himself has chosen it. I went to the tree, I sat under the tree. As I sat there things started settling. The whole universe became a benediction.

    It is difficult to say how long I was in that state. When I went back home it was four o'clock in the morning, so I must have been there by clock time at least three hours--but it was infinity. It had nothing to do with clock time. It was timeless.

    Those three hours became the whole eternity, endless eternity. There was no time, there was no passage of time; it was the virgin reality--uncorrupted, untouchable, unmeasurable.

    And that day something happened that has continued--not as a continuity--but it has still continued as an undercurrent. Not as a permanency--each moment it has been happening again and again. It has been a miracle each moment.

    That night...and since that night I have never been in the body. I am hovering around it. I became tremendously powerful and at the same time very fragile. I became very strong, but that strength is not the strength of a Mohammed Ali. That strength is not the strength of a rock, that strength is the strength of a rose flower--so fragile in his strength...so fragile, so sensitive, so delicate.

    The rock will be there, the flower can go any moment, but still the flower is stronger than the rock because it is more alive. Or, the strength of a dewdrop on a leaf of grass just shining; in the morning sun--so beautiful, so precious, and yet can slip any moment. So incomparable in its grace, but a small breeze can come and the dewdrop can slip and be lost forever.

    Buddhas have a strength which is not of this world. Their strength is totally of love...Like a rose flower or a dewdrop. Their strength is very fragile, vulnerable. Their strength is the strength of life not of death. Their power is not of that which kills; their power is of that which creates. Their power is not of violence, aggression; their power is that of compassion.

    But I have never been in the body again, I am just hovering around the body. And that's why I say it has been a tremendous miracle. Each moment I am surprised I am still here, I should not be. I should have left any moment, still I am here. Every morning I open my eyes and I say, 'So, again I am still here?' Because it seems almost impossible. The miracle has been a continuity.

    Just the other day somebody asked a question--'Osho, you are getting so fragile and delicate and so sensitive to the smells of hair oils and shampoos that it seems we will not be able to see you unless we all go bald.' By the way, nothing is wrong with being bald--bald is beautiful. Just as 'black is beautiful', so 'bald is beautiful'. But that is true and you have to be careful about it.

    I am fragile, delicate and sensitive. That is my strength. If you throw a rock at a flower nothing will happen to the rock, the flower will be gone. But still you cannot say that the rock is more powerful than the flower. The flower will be gone because the flower was alive. And the rock-- nothing will happen to it because it is dead. The flower will be gone because the flower has no strength to destroy. The flower will simply disappear and give way to the rock. The rock has a power to destroy because the rock is dead.

    Remember, since that day I have never been in the body really; just a delicate thread joins me with the body. And I am continuously surprised that somehow the whole must be willing me to be here, because I am no more here with my own strength, I am no more here on my own. It must be the will of the whole to keep me here, to allow me to linger a little more on this shore. Maybe the whole wants to share something with you through me.

    Since that day the world is unreal. Another world has been revealed. When I say the world is unreal I don't mean that these trees are unreal. These trees are absolutely real--but the way you see these trees is unreal. These trees are not unreal in themselves--they exist in god, they exist in absolute reality--but the way you see them you never see them; you are seeing something else, a mirage.

    You create your own dream around you and unless you become awake you will continue to dream. The world is unreal because the world that you know is the world of your dreams. When dreams drop and you simply encounter the world that is there, then the real world.

    There are not two things, god and the world. God is the world if you have eyes, clear eyes, without any dreams, without any dust of the dreams, without any haze of sleep; if you have clear eyes, clarity, perceptiveness, there is only god.

    Then somewhere god is a green tree, and somewhere else god is a shining star, and somewhere else god is a cuckoo, and somewhere else god is a flower, and somewhere else a child and somewhere else a river--then only god is. The moment you start seeing, only god is.

    But right now whatsoever you see is not the truth, it is a projected lie. That is the meaning of a mirage. And once you see, even for a single split moment, if you can see, if you can allow yourself to see, you will find immense benediction present all over, everywhere--in the clouds, in the sun, on the earth.

    This is a beautiful world. But I am not talking about your world, I am talking about my world. Your world is very ugly, your world is your world created by a self, your world is a projected world. You are using the real world as a screen and projecting your own ideas on it.

    When I say the world is real, the world is tremendously beautiful, the world is luminous with infinity, the world is light and delight, it is a celebration, I mean my world--or your world if you drop your dreams.

    When you drop your dreams you see the same world as any Buddha has ever seen. When you dream you dream privately. Have you watched it?--that dreams are private. You cannot share them even with your beloved. You cannot invite your wife to your dream--or your husband, or your friend. You cannot say, 'Now, please come tonight in my dream. I would like to see the dream together.' It is not possible. Dream is a private thing, hence it is illusory, it has no objective reality.

    God is a universal thing. Once you come out of your private dreams, it is there. It has been always there. Once your eyes are clear, a sudden illumination--suddenly you are overflooded with beauty, grandeur and grace. That is the goal, that is the destiny.

    Let me repeat. Without effort you will never reach it, with effort nobody has ever reached it. You will need great effort, and only then there comes a moment when effort becomes futile. But it becomes futile only when you have come to the very peak of it, never before it. When you have come to the very pinnacle of your effort--all that you can do you have done--then suddenly there is no need to do anything any more. You drop the effort.

    But nobody can drop it in the middle, it can be dropped only at the extreme end. So go to the extreme end if you want to drop it. Hence I go on insisting: make as much effort as you can, put your whole energy and total heart in it, so that one day you can see--now effort is not going to lead me anywhere. And that day it will not be you who will drop the effort, it drops on its own accord. And when it drops on its own accord, meditation happens.

    Meditation is not a result of your efforts, meditation is a happening. When your efforts drop, suddenly meditation is there...the benediction of it, the blessedness of it, the glory of it. It is there like a presence...luminous, surrounding you and surrounding everything. It fills the whole earth and the whole sky.

    That meditation cannot be created by human effort. Human effort is too limited. That blessedness is so infinite. You cannot manipulate it. It can happen only when you are in a tremendous surrender. When you are not there only then it can happen. When you are a no- self--no desire, not going anywhere--when you are just herenow, not doing anything in particular, just being, it happens. And it comes in waves and the waves become tidal. It comes like a storm, and takes you away into a totally new reality.

    But first you have to do all that you can do, and then you have to learn non-doing. The doing of the non-doing is the greatest doing, and the effort of effortlessness is the greatest effort.

    Your meditation that you create by chanting a mantra or by sitting quiet and still and forcing yourself, is a very mediocre meditation. It is created by you, it cannot be bigger than you. It is homemade, and the maker is always bigger than the made. You have made it by sitting, forcing in a yoga posture, chanting 'rama, rama, rama' or anything--'blah, blah, blah'-- anything. You have forced the mind to become still.

    It is a forced stillness. It is not that quiet that comes when you are not there. It is not that silence which comes when you are almost non-existential. It is not that beautitude which descends on you like a dove.

    It is said when Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan River, god descended in him, or the holy ghost descended in him like a dove. Yes, that is exactly so. When you are not there peace descends in you...fluttering like a dove...reaches in your heart and abides there and abides there forever.

    You are your undoing, you are the barrier. Meditation is when the meditator is not. When the mind ceases with all its activities--seeing that they are futile--then the unknown penetrates you, overwhelms you.

    The mind must cease for god to be. Knowledge must cease for knowing to be. You must disappear, you must give way. You must become empty, then only you can be full.

    That night I became empty and became full. I became non-existential and became existence. That night I died and was reborn. But the one that was reborn has nothing to do with that which died, it is a discontinuous thing. On the surface it looks continuous but it is discontinuous. The one who died, died totally; nothing of him has remained.

    Believe me, nothing of him has remained, not even a shadow. It died totally, utterly. It is not that I am just a modified rup, transformed, modified form, transformed form of the old. No, there has been no continuity. That day of March twenty-first, the person who had lived for

    many many lives, for millennia, simply died. Another being, absolutely new, not connected at all with the old, started to exist.

    Religion just gives you a total death. Maybe that's why the whole day previous to that happening I was feeling some urgency like death, as if I am going to die--and I really died. I have known many other deaths but they were nothing compared to it, they were partial deaths.

    Sometimes the body died, sometimes a part of the mind died, sometimes a part of the ego died, but as far as the person was concerned, it remained. Renovated many times, decorated many times, changed a little bit here and there, but it remained, the continuity remained.

    That night the death was total. It was a date with death and god simultaneously. trans211

    Osho describes Enlightenment

    Enlightenment is nothing but your becoming light, your inner being becoming light.

    Perhaps you are aware that the physicists say that if anything moves with the speed of light, it becomes light--because the speed is so great that the friction creates fire. The thing is burned, there is only light. The material disappears, only immaterial light remains.

    Enlightenment is the experience of an explosion of light within you.

    Perhaps your desire to be enlightened is moving with the speed of light, like an arrow, so that your very desire, your very longing becomes a flame, an explosion of light. There is nobody who becomes enlightened, there is only enlightenment. There is only a tremendous sunrise within you. upan41

    I must have come across hundreds of mystics describing it as if suddenly thousands of suns have risen within you. That is a common expression in the mystic's language, in all languages, in different countries, in different races. transm22

    Enlightenment simply means an experience of your consciousness unclouded by thoughts, emotions, sentiments. When the consciousness is totally empty, there is something like an explosion, an atomic explosion. Your whole insight becomes full of a light which has no source and no cause. And once it has happened, it remains. It never leaves you for a single moment; even when you are asleep, that light is inside. And after that moment you can see things in a totally different way. After that experience, there is no question in you. last113

    Enlightenment means being fully conscious, aware. Ordinarily we are not conscious and not aware. We are doing things either out of habit or out of biological instincts...

    Just as Freud's conscious mind, unconscious mind, and Jung says collective unconscious mind, I say there is a superconscious mind and collective conscious mind. To reach to the collective conscious mind they are going to the roots and I am going to the flowers.

    But they're all interconnected and all the devices and matters are to discover in you, something which is simply watchfulness.

    For example, I can watch my body--certainly I'm not the body. I can watch my hand: it's hurting, but I'm not the hurt--I'm the watcher. I can watch my thoughts, then I'm not the thought. I'm the watcher and I can watch even the watcher. That is the moment beyond which you cannot go and enlightenment comes.

    Enlightenment is simply that you become so conscious, so full of light, that it starts overflowing your life, your being. You can impart it. silent02

    When one is enlightened one is conscious, but one is not conscious of consciousness. One is perfectly conscious, but there is no object in it. One is simply conscious, as if a light goes on enlightening the emptiness around it. There is no object, there is nothing the light can fall upon. It is pure consciousness. The object has disappeared; your subject has flowered into totality. Now there is no object--and hence, there can be no subject. The object and subject both have disappeared. You are simply conscious. Not conscious of anything, just conscious. You are consciousness....

    ...He is not conscious about enlightenment; he is simply conscious. He lives in consciousness, he sleeps in consciousness, he moves in consciousness. He lives, he dies in consciousness. Consciousness becomes an eternal source in him, a nonflickering flame, a nonwavering state of being. It is not an attribute, it is not accidental; it cannot be taken away. His whole being is conscious. yoga804

    What is enlightenment? Coming to understand, coming to realize that you are not the body. You are the light within; not the lamp, but the flame. You are neither body nor mind. Mind belongs to the body; mind is not beyond body, it is part of the body--most subtle, most refined, but it is part of the body. Mind is also atomic, as body is atomic. You are neither the body nor the mind--then you come to know who you are. And to know who you are is enlightenment....

    Enlightened means you have realized who you are. nomoon05

    Enlightenment simply means becoming aware of yourself. Ordinarily, a man is awake to everything around him, but is not aware who is awake and aware of all the things around. So we remain on the periphery of life and the center remains in darkness. To bring light to that center, consciousness to that center is what enlightenment is.

    It is just being absolutely centered in yourself, focusing all your consciousness upon yourself as if nothing else exists; only you are. last202

    Just be natural so that you can remain in tune with existence. So that you can dance in the rain and you can dance in the sun and you can dance with the trees, and you can have a communion even with the rocks, with the mountains, with the stars.

    Except this, there is no enlightenment.

    Let me define it: Enlightenment is to be in tune with existence.

    To be in tune with nature--the very nature of things--is enlightenment. Against nature there is only misery--and misery created by yourself. Nobody else is responsible for it. mani11

    It will be difficult logically to understand it. It is something to be experienced. Since the moment I found the ego evaporating from me, I have not felt part of the universe, but the universe itself. And yes, I have found many moments when I am bigger than the universe-- because I can see the stars moving within me, the sunrise happening within me, all the flowers blossoming within me. false21

    When I roam the lofty mountains I feel like my soul is raised on high and covered like the peaks in never melting caps of snow. And when I descend into the valleys I feel deep and profound like them and my heart fills with mysterious shadows. The same thing happens at the edge of the sea. There I merge with the surging waves; they pound and roar within me. When I gaze at the sky I expand. I become boundless, unlimited. When I look at the stars, silence permeates me; when I see a flower the ecstasy of beauty overwhelms me. When I hear a bird singing, it's song is an echo of my own inner voice, and when I look into the eyes of an animal I see no difference between them and my own. Gradually my separate existence has been effaced and only God remains. So where shall I look for God now? How shall I seek him? Only he is; I am not.

    I was in the hills, and what they wanted to tell me was transmitted through their silence. The trees, the lakes, the rivers, the brooks, the moon and the stars were all speaking to me in the language of silence. And I understood. The words of God were clear to me, I could only hear him when I became silent. Not before. long06

    I cannot be other than compassionate; I am just helpless. It has nothing to do with you, it is just the only possibility for me.

    The day I came to know myself, I lost many things and I gained a few things. Of the things that I have gained, the most important of them is compassion. So it is irrespective of who is the receiver: a coconut tree or you, it does not matter. I can only look with compassion. My eyes don't have anything else and my heart doesn't have anything else. dawn03

    The day you realize yourself, your very being becomes love. It is no longer a relationship, it is no longer addressed to anyone in particular; it is simply overflowing in all directions and all

    dimensions. And it is not something on my part, that I am doing it. Love cannot be done. And the love that is done is false; it is only pretension. It is just my heartbeat, my love is my life;

    nobody is excluded from it. It is so comprehensive that it can contain the whole universe. you

    too. razor09

    You ask me: Is the process of enlightenment the same for everyone?

    Enlightenment is a very individual process. Because of its individuality, it has created many problems. First: there are no fixed stages through which a person necessarily passes. Every person passes through different phases, because every person in many lives has gathered different kinds of conditionings. So it is not the question of enlightenment. It is the question of the conditionings that will make your way. And everybody has different conditionings, so no two persons' paths are going to be the same. That's why I insist again and again there is no superhighway; there are only footpaths. And that too, not ready-made, not that you find them already there and you have just to walk on them--no. As you walk you make them, your very walking makes them.

    It is said that the path of enlightenment is like a bird flying in the sky: it leaves no footprints behind it, nobody can follow the footprints of the bird. Every bird will have to make its own footprints, but they disappear immediately as the bird goes on flying. The similar is the situation, that's why there is no possibility of a leader and a follower, that's why I say these people--like Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, Krishna--who say that "You just believe me and follow me," don't know anything about enlightenment.

    If they had known, then this statement was impossible, because anybody who has become enlightened, knows that he has not left any footprints behind; now saying to people "Come and follow me," is just absurd.

    So what happened to me is not necessary for anybody else to pass through. It is possible that one may remain normal and suddenly become enlightened.

    It is like here there are fifty people: if we all go to sleep, everybody will have his own dream; you can't have a common dream. That is an impossibility. There is no way to create a common dream. Your dream will be yours, my dream will be mine, and we will be in different places, in different dreams. And when we will wake up, I may wake up at a certain stage in my dream, you may wake up at a certain stage in your dream. How they can be the same?

    Enlightenment is nothing but awakening. For the enlightened person, all our lives are just dreams. They may be good dreams, they may be bad dreams; they may be nightmares, they may be very nice and beautiful dreams, but all the same they are dreams.

    You can wake up any moment. That is always your potentiality. Sometimes you may an effort to wake up, and you find that it is difficult. You may have had dreams in which you are trying to shout but you cannot shout. You want to wake up and get out of the bed, but you cannot, your whole body is paralyzed, as if.

    But in the morning you wake up and you simply laugh at the whole thing, but at the moment when it was happening, it was not a thing to laugh at. It was really serious. Your whole body was almost dead, you could not move your hands, you could not speak, you could not open your eyes. You knew that, now you are finished. But in the morning, you simply don't pay any attention to it, you don't even reconsider it, what it was. Just knowing that it was a dream, it becomes meaningless. And you are awake, then whether the dreams were good or bad does not matter.

    The same is the situation about enlightenment. All the methods that are being used are simply somehow to create a situation in which your dream is broken. How much you are attached with the dream will be different, individual to individual. How much deep is your sleep will be different, individual to individual. But all methods are just to shake you so that you can wake up. At what point you will wake up does not matter at all.

    So my breakdown and breakthrough is not going to be for everybody. It happened that way to me. There were reasons why it happened that way.

    I was working alone on myself, with no friends, no fellow travelers, no commune. To work alone, one is bound to get into many troubles, because there are moments which can only be called nights of soul, so dark and so dangerous. It seems as if you have come to the last breathe of your life, that this is death, nothing else. That experience is a nervous breakdown.

    Facing death, and nobody to support and nobody to encourage, and nobody to say, "Not to be worried, this will pass away," that "This is is only a nightmare, and the morning is very close. Darker the night, the closer is the sunrise. Don't be worried." Nobody around whom you trust, who trusts you--that was the reason for the nervous breakdown. But, it was not harmful. It looked harmful at the moment, but soon the dark night was gone, and the sunrise was there. The breakdown has become the breakthrough.

    To each individual it will happen differently. And the same is true after enlightenment: the expression of enlightenment will be different....

    Enlightenment is a very individual song--always unknown, always new, always unique. It comes never as a repetition. So never compare two enlightened persons, otherwise you are bound to do unjustice with one or the other, or both.

    And don't have any fixed idea. Just very liquid qualities should be remembered. I say liquid qualities, not very determinate qualifications.

    For example, every enlightened person will have a deep silence--almost tangible. In his presence, those who are open, receptive, will become silent. He will have a tremendous contentment, whatever happens makes no difference to his contentment.

    He will not have any question left, all questions have dissolved--not that he knows all answers, but all questions have dissolved. And in that state of utter silence, no-mind, he is capable of answering any question with tremendous profundity. It needs no preparation. He

    himself does not know what he is going to say, it comes spontaneously; sometimes he himself is surprised. But that does not mean that he has answers inside himself, ready-made.

    He has no answers at all. He has no questions at all. He has just a clarity, a light that can be focused on any question, and all the implications of the question, and all the possibilities of its being answered, suddenly become clear....

    ...But the enlightened man has no answers, no scriptures, no quotation marks. He is simply available; just like a mirror, he responds, and he responds with intensity and totality.

    So these are liquid qualities, not qualifications. So don't look on small things, that what he eats, what he wears, where he lives--those are all irrelevant. Just watch for his love, for his compassion, for his trust. Even if you take advantage of his trust, that does not change his trust. Even if you misuse his compassion, cheat his love, that does not make any difference. That is your problem. His trust, his compassion, his love remains just the same.

    His only effort in life will be how to make people awake. Whatever he does, this is the only purpose behind every act: how to make more and more people awake, because through awaking he has come to know the ultimate bliss of life. last329

    Immediately after Osho’s enlightenment, and why he became a master

    If people have become enlightened before thirty-five, then they have survived longer than others, because the body was younger, stronger, and it was not on the decline; it still had a potential to grow. They absorbed the shock, but the shock had shaken everything.

    I was never sick before I became enlightened; I was perfectly healthy. People were jealous of my health. But after enlightenment, suddenly I found that the body had become so delicate that doing anything became impossible. Even going for a walk--and I was running before that, four miles in the morning, four miles in the evening, running, jogging, swimming. I was doing all kinds of things....

    But after enlightenment, suddenly and very strangely, the body became absolutely weak. And it is almost unbelievable--I could not believe it, my father's sister's family, who I was staying with, could not believe it. It was more of a surprise to them because they knew nothing about enlightenment. I suspected there was some connection but they had no idea what had happened: all the hairs on my chest became white, just in one night! And I was twenty-one!

    I could not hide it--because it is a hot country, India, and I used to only have on a wrap- around lunghi the whole day, so my chest was always naked. So everybody in the house became aware of this and was wondering what had happened. I said, "I myself am wondering what has happened." I knew that the body had certainly lost its stamina. It had become fragile, and I lost my sleep completely.

    I have been asked again and again why Ramakrishna died of cancer. I know why he died of cancer: he must have become absolutely vulnerable to any disease. And if it was only Ramakrishna we could think it was just an exception; but Maharshi Raman also died of cancer. That looks strange, that within one hundred years two enlightened people of the highest order died of cancer. Perhaps they lost all resistance to disease.

    I can understand from my own situation, I lost all resistance to diseases. I had never suffered from what you call allergies. I loved perfume so much, and I had never suffered because of it. I had beautiful flowers in all my houses where I lived; and India has such flowers I think no other country has--with great fragrance....

    There are plants, for example a certain flower, "queen of the night"--you can have just one plant, and the whole house will be full of fragrance; and not only your own house, the neighboring houses too will be full of fragrance. And there are many other flowers--champa, chameli, juhi--which are immensely full of fragrance. I always had those flowers around me, and I never suffered from any allergy.

    But after enlightenment I became so allergic that just the body-smell of somebody was enough to give me a cold, the sneezes; and the sneezes triggered something in my chest. I started coughing, and coughing triggered another process; I started having asthma attacks which were absolutely unknown to me. I had never thought that these things would happen to me.

    But I was aware of what was happening. My consciousness and my body had fallen apart; the connection became very loose. The body's resting became impossible, and when you have not rested for many days, then you become vulnerable to all kinds of infections. You are so tired, you cannot resist. And if for years you cannot have any rest, then naturally you lose all resistance....

    My feeling is that because enlightenment is the last lesson of life, there is nothing more to learn, you are unnecessarily hanging around. You have learnt the lesson--that was the purpose of life--so life starts losing contact with the person. And most of these people have died immediately; the shock was so much. And death is not a calamity to them; it is a blessing, because they have attained whatsoever life was to give.

    But to live after enlightenment is really a difficult affair. The most important thing is that one loses contact with his inactive mind, and it becomes impossible to have any contact. The moment you are silent, immediately the energy moves to your transcendental awareness.

    You are aware, even when you are doing something, saying something. The flame is not that strong, because your energy is involved in some activity. But when you are not doing anything, then suddenly the whole energy immediately shifts to the highest point. It is tremendously blissful, it is great ecstasy, but only for consciousness, not for the body.

    Nobody has ever explained exactly what the situation is. I think there may have been a fear that if you explain it to people--they are already not making any effort towards enlightenment-

    -and if you say it is possible that enlightenment may become your death, they may simply freak out! "Then why bother about enlightenment? Then we are good as we are--at least we are alive! Miserable, but we are alive."

    If your body becomes vulnerable, fragile, non-resistant to any kind of disease, that may also give them the argument: "This is not good; it is better not to bother about such things. It is better to be healthy and have no diseases, rather than having enlightenment and then suffer a fragile body and all its implications."

    Perhaps that may have been the reason that it has never been talked about. But I want everything to be made clear. I don't want to leave anything about enlightenment, its process, as a secret.

    It is good for people to know exactly what they are doing and what can be the result. If they do it consciously, knowingly, it will be far better. And those who are not going to make any effort, only they will find excuses; they were not going to make any effort anyway. For those of you who are going to make the effort--even if death comes, it will be a challenge, an adventure, because you have attained whatever life could deliver to you, and then life slipped away. light35

    The first thing I did after my enlightenment, at the age of twenty-one, was to rush to the village where my grandmother was, my father's village....

    Immediately after my enlightenment I rushed to the village to meet two people: first, Magga Baba, the man I was talking about before. You will certainly wonder why. Because I wanted

    somebody to say to me, "You are enlightened." I knew it, but I wanted to hear it from the outside too. Magga Baba was the only man I could ask at that time. I had heard that he had recently returned to the village.

    I rushed to him. The village was two miles from the station. You cannot believe how I rushed to see him. I reached the neem tree....

    I rushed to the neem tree where Magga Baba sat, and the moment he saw me do you know what he did? I could not believe it myself--he touched my feet and wept. I felt very embarrassed because a crowd had gathered and they all thought Magga Baba had now really gone mad. Up till then he had been a little mad, but now he was totally gone, gone forever...gate, gate--gone, and gone forever. But Magga Baba laughed, and for the first time, in front of the people, he said to me, "My boy, you have done it! But I knew that one day you would do it."

    I touched his feet. For the first time he tried to prevent me from doing it, saying, "No, no, don't touch my feet anymore."

    But I still touched them, even though he insisted. I didn't care and said, "Shut up! You look after your business and let me do mine. If I am enlightened as you say, please don't prevent an enlightened man from touching your feet."

    He started laughing again and said, "You rascal! You are enlightened, but still a rascal."...

    I then rushed to my home--that is, my Nani's home, not my father's--because she was the woman I wanted to tell what had happened. But strange are the ways of existence: she was standing at the door, looking at me, a little amazed. She said, "What has happened to you? You are no longer the same." She was not enlightened, but intelligent enough to see the difference in me.

    I said, "Yes, I am no longer the same, and I have come to share the experience that has happened to me."

    She said, "Please, as far as I am concerned, always remain my Raja, my little child."

    So I didn't say anything to her. One day passed, then in the middle of the night she woke me up. With tears in her eyes she said, "Forgive me. You are no longer the same. You may pretend but I can see through your pretense. There is no need to pretend. You can tell me what has happened to you. The child I used to know is dead, but someone far better and luminous has taken his place. I cannot call you my own anymore, but that does not matter. Now you will be able to be called by millions as theirs, and everybody will be able to feel you as his or hers. I withdraw my claim--but teach me also the way."

    This is the first time I have told anybody. My Nani was my first disciple. I taught her the way. My way is simple: to be silent, to experience in one's self that which is always the observer, and never the observed; to know the knower, and forget the known.

    My way is simple, as simple as Lao Tzu's, Chuang Tzu's, Krishna's, Christ's, Moses', Zarathustra's...because only the names differ, the way is the same. Only pilgrims are different; the pilgrimage is the same. And the truth, the process, is very simple.

    I was fortunate to have had my own grandmother as my first disciple, because I have never found anybody else to be so simple. I have found many very simple people, very close to her simplicity, but the profoundness of her simplicity was such that nobody has ever been able to transcend it, not even my father. He was simple, utterly simple, and very profound, but not in comparison to her. I am sorry to say, he was far away, and my mother is very very far away; she is not even close to my father's simplicity.

    You will be surprised to know--and I am declaring it for the first time--my Nani was not only my first disciple, she was my first enlightened disciple too, and she became enlightened long before I started initiating people into sannyas. She was never a sannyasin. glimps16

    And I have to confess, after Magga Baba he (Shambhu Babu) was the second man who recognized that something immeasurable had happened to me. Of course he was not a mystic, but a poet has the capacity, once in a while, to be a mystic, and he was a great poet....

    I understand him, so when I say that although he was not an enlightened master, not a master in any way, I still count him as number two, after Magga Baba, because he recognized me when it was impossible to do so, absolutely impossible. I may not even have recognized myself, but he recognized me. glimps21

    After my enlightenment, for exactly one thousand, three hundred and fifteen days* I tried to remain silent--as much as it was possible in those conditions. For a few things I had to speak, but my speaking was telegraphic.

    My father was very angry with me. He loved me so much that he had every right to be angry. The day he had sent me to the university he had taken a promise from me that I would write one letter every week at least. When I became silent I wrote him the last letter and told him, "I am happy, immensely happy, ultimately happy, and I know from my very depth of being that I will remain so now forever, whether in the body or not in the body. This bliss is something of the eternal. So now every week, if you insist, I can write the same again and again. That will not look okay, but I have promised, so I will drop a card every week with the sign "ditto." Please forgive me, and when you receive my letter with the sign "ditto," you read this letter."

    He thought I had gone completely mad. He immediately rushed from the village, came to the university and asked me, "What has happened to you? Seeing your letter and your idea of this 'ditto,' I thought you were mad. But looking at you, it seems I am mad; the whole world is mad. I take back the promise and the word that you have given to me. There is no need now to write every week. I will continue to read your last letter." And he kept it to the very last day he died; it was under his pillow.

    The man who forced me to speak--for one thousand, three hundred and fifteen days I had remained silent--was a very strange man. He himself had remained silent his whole life. Nobody heard about him; nobody knew about him. And he was the most precious man I have come across in this, or any of my lives in the past. His name was Magga Baba....

    Once in a while, particularly on cold winter nights, I used to find him alone; then he would say something to me.

    He forced me to speak. He said, "Look, I have remained silent my whole life, but they do not hear, they do not listen. They cannot understand it; it is beyond them. I have failed. I have not been able to convey what I have been carrying within me, and now there is not much time left for me. You are so young, you have a long life before you: please don't stop speaking. Start!"

    It is a difficult, almost impossible job to convey things in words, because they are experienced in a wordless state of consciousness. How to convert that silence into sound? There seems to be no way. And there is none.

    But I understood Magga Baba's point. He was very old, and he was saying to me, "You will be in the same position. If you don't start soon, the inner silence, the vacuum, the innermost zero, will go on pulling you inwards. And then there comes a time when you cannot come out. You are drowned in it. You are utterly blissful, but the whole world is full of misery. You could have shown the way. Perhaps somebody may have heard, perhaps somebody may have walked on the path. At least you would not feel that you have not done what was expected of you by existence itself. Yes, it is a responsibility."

    I promised him, "I will do my best." And for thirty years continually I went on and on talking on every subject under the stars. unconc01

    *Note: Between 1981 and 1984, Osho observed a period of silence lasting 1,315 days. Osho has indicated that while Magga Baba encouraged him to teach, he warned Osho not to declare his enlightenment as this would create antagonism. Osho did not publicly acknowledge his enlightenment until 1971.

    My experience is that once you are enlightened, you are so full, just like a rain cloud, you want to shower. invita06

    The moment I was fulfilled, the moment I was blessed by truth, of course I wanted it to be shared; and it was natural that I would share it with my father, with my mother, with my brothers, with my sisters, whom I had known longer than anybody else. And I shared it. unconc22

    I am just a storyteller. From my very childhood I have loved to tell stories, real, unreal. I was not at all aware that this telling of stories would give me an articulateness, and that it would be of tremendous help after enlightenment.

    Many people become enlightened, but not all of them become masters--for the simple reason that they are not articulate, they cannot convey what they feel, they cannot communicate what they have experienced. Now it was just accidental with me, and I think it must have been accidental with those few people who became masters, because there is no training course for it. And I can say it with certainty only about myself.

    When enlightenment came, I could not speak for seven days; the silence was so profound that even the idea of saying anything about it did not arise. But after seven days, slowly, as I became accustomed to the silence, to the beautitude, to the bliss, the desire to share it--a great longing to share it with those whom I loved was very natural.

    I started talking with the people with whom I was in some way concerned, friends. I had been talking to these people for years, talking about all kinds of things. I had enjoyed only one exercise, and that was talking, so it was not very difficult to start talking about the enlightenment--although it took years to refine and bring into words something of my silence, something of my joy. rebel02

    The mystic's greatest problem, greater than attaining his experience, is to express it. zara207

    I have been in different phases of work. First, I was working on myself, then I was working to find the right expression to allow people to know what I have known. silent06

    If somebody becomes enlightened it is not necessary that he will be able to become a Master--or even a teacher. He may know, but he may not be articulate enough to lead others to the same experience. That is a different art.

    It was easy for me to speak because I started speaking before I became enlightened. Speaking became almost a natural thing to me before I became enlightened.

    I have never learned any oratory, never been to any school where oratory is taught. I have never even read a book on the art of speaking. From my very childhood, because I was argumentative and everybody wanted me to keep silent.... In the family, in the school, in the college, in the university, everybody was saying to me, "Don't speak at all!"

    I was expelled from many colleges for the simple reason that teachers were complaining that they could not complete the syllabus, the course for the year, because "this student leads us into such arguments that nothing can be completed."

    But all that gave me great opportunity and made me more and more articulate. It became just a natural thing to me to argue with the neighbors, to argue with the teachers, to argue on the street--anywhere. Just to find a man was enough and I will start some argument....

    I loved it, just the way I love it now! So when I became enlightened it was not difficult for me. It was very easy.

    So everybody is not necessarily going to be a Master or a teacher. That is a totally different art. last319

    From my very childhood, as long as I remember, I have been arguing, fighting. Of course, a child will fight and argue in a child's way, but from my very childhood I have never been ready to accept anything without being rationally convinced about it. And I found very soon, very early in life, that all these people with very big heads--professors, heads of the departments, deans, vice-chancellors--are just hollow. You just a scratch a little bit, you find nothing inside. They don't have any argument for what they have been thinking is their own philosophy. They have borrowed it, they have never discovered it on their own. So I have been continuously fighting, and in this fighting I have been sharpening my own argument. I don't have a philosophy of my own. my whole function is deprogramming, so whatever you say, I will destroy it. And I never say anything, so I never give any chance to anybody to destroy it. My purpose is to deprogram you, to clean you, to uncondition you and leave you fresh, young, innocent. And from there you can grow into a real, authentic individual--otherwise you are just a personality, not an individuality. A personality is borrowed, it is a mask. And my whole effort is how to help a person to be authentic, to be himself, naked. last325

    You ask me: Is it your supreme ability to communicate that makes you the master of masters?

    The situation of the world has changed dramatically. Just three hundred years ago, the world was very big. Even if Gautam Buddha had wanted to approach all human beings, it would not have been possible; just the means of communication were not available. People were living in many worlds, almost isolated from each other. That has a simplicity.

    Jesus had to face the Jews, not the whole world. It would not have been possible, sitting on his donkey, to go around the world. Even if he had managed to cover the small kingdom of Judea, that would have been too much. The education of people was very confined. They were not even aware of each other's existence.

    Gautam Buddha, Lao Tzu in China, Socrates in Athens--they were all contemporaries but they had no idea of each other.

    That's why I say that before the scientific revolution in the means of communication and in the means of transportation, there were many worlds, sufficient unto themselves. They never thought of others, they had no idea even that others existed. As people became acquainted more and more with each other, the world became smaller. Now a Buddha will not be able to manage, nor Jesus nor Moses nor Confucius. They will all have very localized minds and very localized attitudes.

    We are fortunate that the world is now so small that you cannot be local. In spite of yourself, you cannot be local; you have to be universal. You have to think of Confucius, you have to think of Krishna, you have to think of Socrates, you have to think of Bertrand Russell. Unless you think of the world as one single unit, and all the contributions of different geniuses, you will not be able to talk to the modern man. The gap will be so big--twenty-five centuries, twenty centuries...almost impossible to bridge it.

    The only way to bridge it is that the person who has come to know should not stop at his own knowing, should not be contented to only give expression to what he has come to know. He has to make a tremendous effort to know all the languages. The work is vast, but it is exciting--the exploration into human genius from different dimensions.

    And if you have within yourself the light of understanding, you can create, without any difficulty, a synthesis. And the synthesis is not only going to be of all the religious mystics-- that will be partial. The synthesis has to include all the artists--their insights--all the musicians, all the poets, all the dancers--their insights. All the creative people who have contributed to life, who have made humanity richer, have to be taken into account. And most important of all is scientific growth.

    To bring scientific growth into a synthetic vision with heart and religion was not possible in the past. In the first place there was no science--and it has changed a thousand and one things. Life can never be the same again.

    And nobody has thought ever of the artistic people, that their contribution is also religious. In my vision it is a triangle--science, religion, art.

    And they are such different dimensions, they speak different languages, they contradict each other; they are not in agreement superficially--unless you have a deep insight in which they all can melt and become one.

    My effort has been to do almost the impossible.

    In my university days as a student, my professors were at a loss. I was a student of philosophy, and I was attending science classes--physics, chemistry and biology. Those professors were feeling very strange; "You are here in the university to study philosophy. Why are you wasting your time with chemistry?"

    I said, "I have nothing to do with chemistry; I just want to have a clear insight into what chemistry has done, what physics has done. I don't want to go into details, I just want the essential contribution."

    I was rarely in my classes, I was mostly in the library. My professors were continually saying, "What are you doing the whole day in the library?--because so many complaints have come from the librarian that you are the first to enter the library, and you have to be almost physically taken out of the library. The whole day you are there. And not only in the philosophical department, you are roaming around the library in all the departments which have nothing to do with you."

    I said to them, "It is difficult for me to explain to you, but my effort in the future is going to be to bring everything that has some truth in it into a synthetic whole and create a way of life which is inclusive of all, which is not based on arguments and contradictions, which is based on a deep insight into the essential core of all the contributions that have been made to human knowledge, to human wisdom."

    They thought I would go mad--the task I have chosen can lead anyone to madness, it is too vast. But they were not aware that madness is impossible for me, that I have left the mind far behind; I am just a watcher.

    And the mind is such a delicate and complicated computer. Man has made great computers but none is yet comparable to the human mind. Just a single human mind has the capacity to contain all the libraries of the world. And just a single library--the British Museum library--has books, which if you go on making them like a wall, one by one, they will go three times round the earth. And that is only one big library. Moscow has the same kind of library--perhaps bigger. Harvard has the same kind of library.

    But a single human mind is capable of containing all that is written in all these books, of memorizing it. In a single brain there are more than a billion cells, and each single cell is capable of containing millions of pieces of information. Certainly one will go mad if one is not already standing out of the mind. If you have not reached the status of meditation, madness is sure. They were not wrong, but they were not aware of my efforts towards meditation.

    So I was reading strange books, strange scriptures, from all over the world; yet I was only a watcher, because as far as I was concerned, I had come home. I had nothing to learn from all that reading; that reading was for a different purpose, and the purpose was to make my message universal, to make it free from local limitations.

    And I am happy that I have succeeded in it completely....

    Because you love me, you call me "master of masters." It is out of your love.

    As far as I am concerned, I simply think of myself only an ordinary human being who was stubborn enough to remain independent, resisted all conditioning, never belonged to any religion, never belonged to any political party, never belonged to any organization, never belonged to any nation, any race.

    I have tried in every possible way just to be myself, without any adjective; and that has given me so much integrity, individuality, authenticity, and the tremendous blissfulness of being fulfilled.

    But it was the need of the time. After me, anybody trying to be a master will have to remember that he has to pass through all the things I have passed through; otherwise, he cannot be called a master. He will remain just localized--a Hindu teacher, a Christian missionary, a Mohammedan priest--but not a master of human beings as such.

    After me it is going to be really difficult to be a master. transm37

    Osho’s Library grows

    My father used to send me money, and that money helped me to purchase as many books as possible.

    Now, the library you see--it has one hundred and fifty thousand books. Most of them were purchased with his money. All the money he gave me went into purchasing books, and soon I was receiving scholarships--and all that money went into books. christ08

    I must have seen thousands of books, and perhaps no other man in the whole world can claim to know more about books than I know. But in this whole experience of thousands of books I have never come across another book which can be compared in any way with P.D.Ouspensky's Tertium Organum.

    Tertium Organum means the third canon of thought. He gave this name to this great and incomparably unique book because there have been two other books in the past: the first was

    written by Aristotle, and he called it the first Organum, the first principle of thought; and the second was written by Bacon, and he called it Novum Organum, a new canon of thought.

    Then Ouspensky wrote Tertium Organum, the third canon of thought, and he declared just in the beginning of the book that "although I am calling it the third canon of thought, it existed before the first canon of thought ever existed."

    This book contains so many mysteries that each page, almost each paragraph, each sentence seems to be so pregnant with meaning...This is the only book...

    I used to love underlining my books, that's why I have never been interested in reading books from any library. I cannot underline a book that has been borrowed from a library, I cannot put my stamp on it. And I hate to read a book which has been underlined by somebody else, because those lines which have been underlined stand out and they unnecessarily interfere in my own conception, my own flow.

    This is the only book which I started underlining and I recognized after a few pages that every line has to be underlined. But I could not be unjust to the book. All my books in the library are underlined. Knowing perfectly well after a few pages that this book can be left not underlined, but that will be unjustified...so I had to underline the whole book. satyam09

    In Jabalpur there was one beautiful place where I was an everyday visitor; I would go for at least one or two hours. It was called the Thieves' Market. Stolen things were sold there, and I was after stolen books because so many people were stealing books and selling them and I was getting such beautiful books. I got Gurdjieff's first book from that Thieves' Market, and Ouspensky's In Search of the Miraculous from that Thieves' Market.

    The book was fifty rupees; from there I got it for half a rupee, because in the Thieves' Market, books are sold by weight. Those people, they don't bother about whether it is Ouspensky, Plato, or Russell. Everything is all rubbish; whether you purchase old newspapers or you purchase Socrates, it is the same price. I had collected in my library thousands of books from the Thieves' Market. Everybody used to ask me, "Are you mad or something? Why do you go continually to the Thieves' Market?--because people don't go there. To be associated with the Thieves' Market is not good."

    I would say, "I don't care. Even if they think that I am a thief, it is okay."

    To me the Thieves' Market has been the best source--even books which were not in the university library I have found in the Thieves' Market. And all those shopkeepers were selling stolen books, and every kind of stolen thing. In India, in every big city there is a Thieves' Market. In Bombay there is a Thieves' Market where you can find everything at just throw- away prices. But it is risky because it is stolen property.

    I once got into trouble because I purchased three hundred books from one shop, simultaneously, in one day, because a whole library of somebody's had been stolen. Just for one hundred and fifty rupees, three hundred books! I could not leave a single one. I had to

    borrow money and immediately rush there, and I told that man, "No book should go from here."

    Those books had seals with a certain man's name and address, and finally the police came. I said, "Yes, these are the books, and I have purchased them from the Thieves' Market. In the first place this man is almost ninety years old--he will be dying soon."

    The police inspector said to me, "What are you arguing about?"

    I said, "I am simply making things clear to you. This man is going to die sooner or later; these books will be rotten. I can give you these books, but you have to give one hundred and fifty rupees to somebody, because I have borrowed the money. And in fact you cannot catch me because that shopkeeper is there; he will be a witness for me that the books were sold to him. Now, he cannot go on remembering who is selling him old newspapers, and old books; he does not know who has brought them.

    So first you have to go to that man and find the thief If you find the thief get one hundred and fifty rupees from him or from anywhere you want. These books are here, and they cannot be in a better situation anywhere else. And that ninety-year-old man won't be able to read them again, so what is the fuss?"

    The inspector said, "You sound sane, logical, but these are stolen books...and I cannot go against the law."

    I said, "You go according to the law. Go to the place from where I have purchased them--and I have purchased them, I have not stolen them. That shopkeeper has also purchased them, he has not stolen them. So find the thief."

    He said, "But on the book there is a seal and the name."

    I said, "Don't be worried--next time you come there will be no seal and no name. First you find the thief, then I am always here, at your service."

    And as he went away I tore one page from each, the first empty page which means nothing, and I just signed the books. From that day I started signing my books, because it might have come in handy someday if my books were stolen--at least they had my signature and the date. And because I had taken out the first page, I would sign on two or three pages inside also, in case my books were stolen, but they never were.

    My professors used to ask me, "You are reading day and night, but why are you so averse to the textbooks?"

    I said, "For the simple reason that I don't want the examiner to see that I am a parrot." And fortunately that helped me. person04

    Soon I had friends all over India, and I was purchasing books everywhere--in Poona, in Bombay, in New Delhi, in Amritsar, in Ludhiana, in Calcutta, in Allahabad, in Varanasi, in Madras. All over the country I was purchasing as many books as possible--as many as the friend with whom I was staying could manage. christ08

    Osho bluffs his way into D.N. Jain College

    It became a constant trouble. Colleges, universities would not accept me, would not give me admission, and they would not give the reasons. Somehow I had to convince a principal.

    I still remember the scene....

    This principal was a little crazy. He was a devotee of the mother goddess Kali of Calcutta, and every morning from four o'clock he would start....

    He was a very big man. He was a wrestler in his youth, and the rumor was that in the early days the famous wrestler Gama was defeated by him--but by that time Gama was no longer famous. And this principal had the body of a great wrestler; he was black, looked dangerous. And from four o'clock the whole neighborhood was tortured by him--"Jai Kali." And he had a real loud voice, no loudspeakers needed.

    When I was refused from a few places, I thought perhaps this crazy person could be persuaded. So I went early in the morning, five o'clock. He was in his temple--in his beautiful bungalow, he had a small temple, and the whole area was sounding, resounding, "Jai Kali"-- victory to Kali.

    I went into the temple. He was alone. I also started shouting, "Victory to Kali." He looked at me. He said, "You are a believer in Kali?"

    I said, "Anybody who has any intelligence has to be a believer in Kali. And you are the greatest man I have come across."

    He said, "Everybody thinks I am crazy." I said, "They are all crazy."

    He invited me for breakfast. And he said, "What are you doing?"

    I said I was studying in a certain college, although I had been expelled from that college.

    He said, "You leave all those colleges and come to my college. I will give you all the scholarships, every kind of help, because you are the first person who has recognized me."

    In that way I got entry into his college. But once I was in, he was in trouble--professors started coming to him.... He called me, and he said, "This is not good. It seems you bluffed me."

    I said, "This is true, I bluffed you--because there was no other way."

    He said, "Then you will have to do one thing: you should not come to the college at all; just come to take your examinations."

    I said, "What about my percentage for being present in the lectures?"

    He said, "I will take care of it. You will get ninety percent for attendance, but don't come to the college! Because every professor is complaining--it is not a question of one professor; you are torturing everybody. They all say, `Now we cannot compete with this young man. He has read the latest--and we can see that we are twenty years behind, but we cannot manage to read all that has happened in twenty years. We have to take care of the children and the wife and the whole family. And he makes us so embarrassed. He brings facts and we know that he is right, but we cannot tolerate this constant embarrassment. And because of him, other students are losing respect. They are all thinking that we know nothing. He has created the atmosphere in the college that all the professors are idiots.'"

    I said, "It is true, you have got first-class idiots."

    He said, "Listen, I am giving you all the facilities for not coming to the college."

    I said, "That's a perfectly good arrangement, but once in a while can I come to your temple just to participate in the worship?"

    He said, "Now there is no need to bluff me. I was also surprised that nobody in my whole life had said that I was a great man. Only this young man has recognized my spirituality. You bluffed me once, that's enough."

    For two years I did not go to the college, but I was going to the university library, getting ready for my post graduation so I could torture the post-graduate professors. sermon03

    Osho is invited to Sagar University for his MA, and is aided by vice chancellor, Dr. Tripathi

    After the B.A. I left Jabalpur because one of the professors in Sagar University, S.S. Roy, was persistently asking me, writing me, phoning me to say, "After your B.A. you join this university for your post-graduation."

    From Jabalpur University to Sagar University there is not much distance--one hundred miles. But Sagar University was in many ways unique. It was a small university compared to Benares University or Aligarh University, which had ten thousand students, twelve thousand students. They are just like Oxford or Cambridge--big universities, big names. Sagar University had only one thousand students and almost three hundred professors, so for every three students, one professor. It was a rare place; perhaps nowhere in the world can you find another university where there is one professor for three students.

    And the man who had founded the university was acquainted with all the best professors around the world. Sagar was his birthplace; Doctor Harisingh Gaur was his name. He was a world-famous authority on law, and earned so much money--and never gave a single pai to any beggar, to any institution, to any charity. He was known as the most miserly person in the whole of India.

    And then he founded the university and gave his whole life's earning. That was millions of dollars. He said to me, "That's why I was a miser; otherwise there was no way--I was a poor man, I was born a poor man. If I were doing charity and giving to this hospital and to this beggar and to that orphan, this university would not have existed." For this university...he had carried his whole life only one idea, that his birthplace should have one of the best universities in the world. And certainly he created one of the best universities in the world.

    While he was alive he managed to bring professors from all over the world. He gave them double salaries, triple salaries, whatsoever they wanted--and no work, because there were only one thousand students, which even a small college has in India; one thousand students is not a large number. And he opened all the departments which only a university like Oxford can afford. Oxford has nearabout three hundred and fifty departments.

    He opened all the departments which exist anywhere in the world. There were hundreds of departments without students but with full staff: the head of the department, the assistant professor, the professor, the lecturer. He said, "Don't be worried. First create the university-- and make it the best. Students will come, will have to come." Then all the professors and all the deans were all in search of the best students. And somehow this professor, S.S. Roy, who was the head of the department of philosophy, got his eye on me.

    I used to go every year to the university for the inter-university debating competition. And for four years I was winning the trophy and for four years he was listening to me, as a judge--he was one of the judges. The fourth year he invited me to his home, and he said, "Listen, I wait for you for one year. I know that after one year, when the next inter-university debating competition is held, you are bound to be there.

    "The way you present your arguments is strange. It is sometimes so weird that it seems...how did you manage to look from this angle? I have been thinking about a few problems myself,

    but I never looked from that aspect. It strikes me that perhaps you go on dropping any aspect that can happen to the ordinary mind, and you only choose the aspect that is unlikely to happen to anybody.

    "For four years you have been winning the shield for the simple reason that the argument is unique, and there is nobody who is ready to answer it. They have not even thought about it, so they are simply in shock.

    "Your opponents--you reduce them so badly, one feels pity for them, but what can we do? And I have been giving you ninety-nine percent marks out of a hundred. I wanted to give you more than a hundred, but even ninety-nine.... It has become known to people that I am favorable to a certain student. This is too much, because nobody goes beyond fifty.

    "I have called you to my home for dinner to invite you to leave Jabalpur University and come here. Now this is your fourth year, you are finished when you graduate. For post-graduation you come here. I cannot miss having you as my student; if you don't come here then I am going to join Jabalpur University."

    And he was a well-known authority; if he wanted to come, Jabalpur University would have been immensely happy to accept him as head of the department.

    I said, "No, don't go to that much trouble. I can come here, and I love the place." It is situated...perhaps it is the best-situated university in the world, in the hills near a tremendously vast lake. It is so silent--such huge trees, ancient trees--that just to be there is enough education.

    And Doctor Harisingh Gaur must have been a tremendous lover of books. He donated all his library, and he managed to get as many books as possible from every corner of the world. A single man's effort...it is rare; he created Oxford just single-handedly, alone. Oxford was created over one thousand years; thousands of people have worked. This man's work is really a piece of art. Single-handedly, with his own money, he put himself at stake.

    So I loved the place. I said, "You need not be worried, I will be coming--but you have seen me only in the debate competitions. You don't know much about me; I may prove a trouble for you, a nuisance. I would like you to know everything about me before you decide."

    Professor S.S. Roy said, "I don't want to know anything about you. The little bit that I have come to know, just by seeing you, your eyes, your way of saying things, your way of approaching reality, is enough. And don't make me frightened about trouble and nuisance-- you can do whatsoever you want."

    I said, "Remember that financially I am always broke, so I will be continuously borrowing money from you and never returning it. Things have to be made clear beforehand; otherwise later on you can say, `This you never said.' You will have to lend me money whenever I want. I am not going to return it, although it will be said I am borrowing--but on your part you have

    to understand that that money is gone, because from where can I return it? I don't have any source.

    "Second, you have to make arrangements in the university for my free lodging and boarding. Thirdly, you have to ask the vice-chancellor, because I don't know him--or you can introduce me to him--for his special scholarship. He is entitled to give one special scholarship. Other scholarships are there, which are smaller scholarships given to talented people--first class, first gold medalist, this and that; I want the special scholarship which is three times more than any other scholarship.

    "It is special because the vice-chancellor is entitled to give it to anyone talented, not talented, in the good list of the university, not in the good list of the university; it does not matter. It is his personal choice--because if they start thinking about my character certificates and this and that, I cannot produce a single character certificate.

    "I have been in many colleges because I have been expelled again and again. So in four years time. People study in one college, I have studied in many, but all that I can bring from

    them is expulsion orders. I cannot produce a single character certificate--so you have to recommend me. You are my only character certificate."

    He said, "Don't be worried about that." So I moved to Sagar. dark06

    I moved to another city, Sagar, and gave all my certificates of expulsion to the vice-chancellor of the university. He said, "But why are you telling me all these terrible things?"

    I said, "I am telling you: these are my character certificates. And I don't want to keep you in the dark; first you should know about me, only then give me admission. Otherwise it is safer not to give me admission, rather than expel me later on, because then it will be your responsibility. And you will be condemned for it, because I always do the right thing; perhaps at the right moment, the right thing done rightly is too much, and the people who have been continually doing wrong things freak out. So I am telling you these are my character certificates."

    He said, "You are a strange young man but I cannot refuse you, because who else would give such character certificates? And I am the last to think of expelling you, because each time you are right. I am not going to deny you admission."

    He gave me admission--not only admission, he gave me scholarships. He gave me free food, lodging, boarding, everything free. He said, "You should be given all respect, because so much injustice has been done to you."

    I told him, "One thing you should remember: you are doing all these things; it is so compassionate of you; but if sometimes a problem arises then I am going to give you a tough time. I will not think of your favors--that you must keep in your mind--I cannot be bribed."

    He said, "l am not bribing you, these are not bribes. I really am impressed." He was the only person who did not expel me for two years continuously. And those two years were the hardest for my professors because those were the two last years, the post-graduate years. So many complaints....

    But that man, Doctor Tripathi--he was a very great historian. He was a professor of history at Oxford, and from there, when he retired, he became vice-chancellor of Sagar university. He kept his word.

    He simply went on throwing all complaints into the wastepaper basket, although every day when I used to go for a morning walk, passing his house, he would tell me, "So many complaints came yesterday; they are all in the wastepaper basket." And he was so happy that he had been able to keep his word against all odds. It was really difficult for him; there were complaints from students, from superintendents, from the proctor, from professors. misery01

    Every child, if left and helped to grow according to his own sensibilities, will bring something beautiful into the world, some unique personality. Right now everybody is a copy of everybody else.

    This very vice-chancellor, when for the first time I entered the university, looked at me and asked, "Why are you growing a beard?"

    I said, "I am not growing it, it is growing. Don't ask nonsense questions. On the contrary, I can ask why you are cutting your beard."

    He said, "Settled. I will not ask anything and you will not ask anything."

    I said, "No. You can ask anything, but you have to have the courage to receive the answer. You have to say that you asked a wrong question. I am not growing it, I am not pulling my hairs every day so that they grow; I am not watering them. You are shaving twice a day. My hairs are natural and you are unnecessarily becoming a woman."

    He said, "What?"

    I said, "It is so easy to understand. Do you think a woman would look good with a beard? The same is true about you--without a beard, you look just like a woman. A little weird, but. "

    He said, "I promise never to disturb you, but don't spread these ideas in the university, that I look like a woman, a little weird."

    I looked as I wanted. I lived as naturally as I wanted. That has given me a tremendous sense of peace and integrity. There is no regret. There is no complaint against life, only deep gratitude. turnin07

    I am reminded of one of my vice-chancellors. He was a world-famous historian. He had been a professor of history in Oxford for almost twenty years, and after his retirement from Oxford,

    he came back to India. He had a world-famous name, and he was elected to be the vice- chancellor of the university I was studying in. He was a nice man, a beautiful personality, with immense knowledgeability, scholarship, recognition--so many books to his credit.

    By chance, the day he took charge as vice-chancellor was Gautam Buddha's birthday. And Gautam Buddha's birthday is more important than anybody else's birthday, because Gautam Buddha's birthday is also his day of enlightenment, and also his day of leaving the body. The same day he was born, the same day he became enlightened, the same day he died.

    The whole university gathered to hear him speak on Gautam Buddha. And he was a great historian, he had written about Gautam Buddha; and he spoke with great emotion. Tears in his eyes, he said, "I have always felt that if I had been born in Gautam Buddha's time, I would have never left his feet."

    According to my habit I stood up, and I said, "You please take your words back." He said, "But why?"

    I said, "Because they are false. You have been alive in Raman Maharshi's time. He was the same kind of man, his was the same enlightenment--and I know that you have not even visited him. So whom are you trying to befool? You would not have visited Gautam Buddha either. Wipe your tears, they are crocodile tears. You are simply a scholar and you don't know anything about enlightenment or people like Gautam Buddha."

    There was a great silence in the auditorium. My professors were afraid that I might be expelled; they were always afraid, that any time. And I had told them, "You don't be worried

    about me. I have been expelled from many colleges, universities--it has become almost my way of life, being expelled."

    But now they were very much afraid. They loved me, and they wanted me.... But to create such a situation, such an awkward situation. and nobody knew what to do, how to break the

    ice. In those few seconds it looked as if hours had passed. The vice-chancellor was standing there--but he was certainly a man of some superior quality. He wiped his tears and asked that he should be forgiven--perhaps he was wrong. And he invited me to his house so that we could discuss it in more detail.

    But he said, before the whole university, "You are right. I would not have gone to Gautam Buddha, I know it. I was not aware when I said it; it was just emotional, I was carried away. Yes, I have never been to Raman Maharshi when he was alive. And I had been very close to his place many times--I used to deliver lectures in Madras University, from where it is only a few hours' journey to Arunachal. I have been told by many friends, 'You should go and see this man'--and I always went on postponing till the man died."

    The whole university could not believe it, my professors could not believe it. But his humbleness touched everybody. Respect for him grew tremendously; and we became friends. He was very old--he was almost sixty-eight--and I was only twenty-four, but we

    became friends. And he never for a moment allowed me to feel that he was a great scholar, that he was the vice-chancellor, that he was my grandfather's age.

    On the contrary, he said to me, "I don't know what happened that day; I am not so humble a man. Being a professor in Oxford for twenty years, being a visiting professor to almost all the universities of the world, I have become very egoistic. But you destroyed everything in a single stroke. And I will remain grateful to you for my whole life: if you had not stood up, I might have remained believing that I would have done this. But now I would like it...if you can find someone, then I would like to sit by his feet and listen to him."

    And you will not believe it that when I said, "Then sit down and listen. " he said, "What!"

    I said, "Just look at me. Don't be bothered by my age, sit down and listen to me." And you will not believe it--that old man sat down and listened to me, to whatever I wanted to say to him. But rare are people who have so much courage and so much openness.

    After that day he used to come to the hostel to visit me. Everybody was puzzled: what had happened?--and I had created for him such an embarrassing situation! He used to take me to his house, and we would sit together and he would ask me, "Say anything--I want to listen. My whole life I have been talking; I have forgotten listening. And I have been saying things which I don't know." And he listened the way a disciple listens to a master.

    My professors were very much puzzled. They said, "Have you done some magic on that old man? or has he gone senile? or what is the matter? To see him, we have to make an appointment, and we have to wait on a long list. When our time comes, only then can we meet him. And he comes to see you--not only that, he listens to you. What has happened?"

    I said, "The same can happen to you too, but you are not that intelligent, not that sensitive, not that understanding. That old man is really rare." bond38

    One of my vice-chancellors, even though I was only a student in the university, made it a point that he should be informed whenever I was going to speak. No matter what, he would cancel all appointments and he would come and listen to me. And I asked him, "You are a great historian...." He was a professor of history in the University of Oxford, before he became the vice-chancellor in India.

    He said, "I love your gaps. Those gaps show that you are absolutely unprepared, you are not an orator. You wait for God, and if he is waiting...then what can you do? You have to wait in silence. When he speaks, you speak; when he is silent, you are silent."

    The gaps are more important than the words because the words can be distorted by the mind but not the gaps. And if you can understand the gaps, then you have understood the silent message, the silent presence of the divine. spirit02

    Osho excels in Public speaking

    An incident happened...I was a student, but I used to go to conferences and other places to speak on different subjects. There was a meeting on the birthday of Nanak, the founder of Sikhism. The president of the meeting was the chief justice of Madhya Pradesh high court, and I was the speaker. I was just a student but this man, whose name was Ganesh Bhatt, was a rare man. I have never come across another man of his quality.

    He was the chief justice and I was only a postgraduate student. After I spoke he simply declared to the assembly of almost ten thousand sikhs, "Now there is nothing more to be said. At least I cannot say anything better than has been said by this young man, so I will not deliver the presidential address, because that may spoil what he has said to you. I would rather that you go home silently pondering over what he has said, and meditating upon it."

    The Sikhs were surprised, everybody was surprised, and as I was stepping down from the podium the chief justice, Ganesh Bhatt, touched my feet. I said, "What are you doing? You are of the age of my father. You are a learned man, you are a brahmin."

    He said, "Nothing matters--neither my being a brahmin, nor my age, nor my prestige, nor my being the chief justice. What matters is that whatever you have said has come from the deepest being. It was unexpected...I have presided over many meetings and I have listened to many learned people, but all that they say is within quotation marks. For the first time I have heard a man who speaks directly, without any quotation marks--who speaks on his own authority. So don't prevent me. I am showing my gratitude by touching your feet."

    The judges had come because the chief justice was presiding over the meeting, and the advocates of the high court had come because the chief justice was there--they were all shocked! But Ganesh Bhatt became a regular visitor to my house. It became almost a regular routine that his car would be standing in front of my house.

    People whose cases were being heard in the high court started coming to me. I said, "I cannot help you."

    They said, "Just a word from you, and he will not do anything against it."

    I said, "I cannot do any such thing. He comes here with such respect towards me that I cannot bring up such trivia."

    It became a problem. I had to keep a servant in front of my house to send these people away, otherwise everybody was coming to the house saying, "I am in much trouble, and just a little support from you will get me out of it."

    After he retired from the chief justice-ship he became the vice-chancellor of Sagar University. By that time I had become a professor in Jabalpur University, and I had gone to Sagar to

    speak in a public conference of all religions. He heard that I had come, so he invited me to the university where he was now the vice-chancellor.

    Once I had been a student in that university, and because the vice-chancellor had called the meeting, all the professors and all the students, everybody was present. I was worried about only one thing--that he may do the same act again. The professors who had taught me were there, and thousands of students were there who had also been students, junior to me--and he did his act.

    As I went on the podium he stood, touched my feet, and said to the audience, "To be learned is one thing, and to know on your own experience--face to face--is a totally different thing. In my long life I have been in high positions, and I have come across so many learned people, and I can say with absolute confidence that learning brings no transformation to their being. The transformation of one's being comes through some other door, not through the doors of mind."

    It was a great shock! Many of them were my teachers, many of them were students who knew me when I was a student in that university, and their vice-chancellor touching my feet....

    My old professors gathered when I came down after speaking, saying, "This is a strange phenomenon. We had never expected. "

    I said, "I was studying under you, but you never looked deeply into me, you never looked into my eyes. You never thought about the questions I was asking. You simply thought of one thing--that I was just creating trouble for you because you had no answer, and you were not courageous enough to say, `I don't know.'"

    Intellectuals are very weak about one point. They cannot say, "I don't know."

    Only an enlightened being can say, "I don't know." His innocence and his enlightenment are synonymous. tahui08

    I was a student in the university, and I was winning all kinds of debates, eloquence competitions, all over the country. I had filled my head of the department's office with all kinds of trophies and cups--gold and silver. And he started telling me, "If you go on winning in this way, I think I will have to move out of my office. There is no space left."

    I said, "You don't have to move out, I will move all the trophies and all the cups." He said, "No, that is credit to the department."

    I said, "Then you have to decide whether you want to be in the office or not." And finally he had to move out of the office. He created another small office on the verandah where he used to sit, because his whole office became a showplace for any guest.

    One day he asked me--because in my own university there was going to be a national university competition--"Why do you go on unnecessarily traveling long distances? What is your purpose?"

    I said, "I don't have any purpose. I love it--that's my way of playing. That's my way of telling stories which have no purpose at all. Just the sheer joy, overflowing life. I am not old enough to think about purposes."

    He said, "What?"

    I said, "Yes, I am not old enough, and I will never be old enough to think about purpose and meaning. I rejoice in whatever I am doing. There is no purpose. "

    I told my head of the department, "There is no purpose. I enjoy talking. I love a heart-to-heart talk."

    And that day the competition was going to be held. There used to be two persons from each

    university--one opposing the subject and one supporting the subject. I was opposing the subject, but my partner became so nervous. it was his first time to come to the stage.

    The student who used to come with me around the country had died in an accident, so I had to find a new partner, and that was his first time. I tried hard to prepare him...to repeat his speech many times, but finally when the time came he disappeared.

    So the vice-chancellor asked me what to do? I said, "I can manage. First I will speak in support--because my partner is missing, and I don't want to lose that prize--and then I will oppose."

    He said, "My God! You will do both the things?" I said, "Just try. It will be a great enjoyment."

    So I spoke for it, and I spoke against it, and I had both the prizes, first and second.

    And as I was going out, the vice-chancellor took me into a corner and said, "It was a miracle. When you were speaking in favor of it, I was thinking what will you do? You are giving such a great argument in favor, I don't think you will be able to oppose it. But when you started opposing, I thought, My God!--your arguments are so clear. What happened to the other arguments. ?"

    He said, "But I want to ask you one thing, that's why I have pulled you out of the crowd. Do you have any convictions of your own?"

    I said, "I just love talking. You have heard only two sides--there are many sides. And if you want some day I can speak from many points of view. These are only two polar opposites, but there are middle positions and there are at least seven positions on each subject."

    He said "That would drive me mad. Just these two positions drive me completely out of my mind. I don't think I am going to sleep, because I am wondering what is right."

    I said, "That is your problem. I enjoyed the whole game, and I have got both the prizes. And this is far better. If you can convince other vice-chancellors that only one person is coming and he will represent both the sides, it will be far easier for me because I won't have to prepare the other person. It is better and easier. I don't have any belief, I don't have any prejudice. I am utterly open. And because I love, it is a game."

    Your life should be a playfulness, not a purpose. Your life should be a fun, not goal oriented.

    It should not be business, it should be pure love. celebr05

    Dr. Harisingh Gaur, the founder of Sagar University

    I was a student, and the man who had founded the university, Harisingh Gaur, was still the vice-chancellor. We became friends, because I used to go for a morning walk on a lonely street early in the morning before sunrise and he also used to go on the same street, alone. We were the only persons, so naturally...it started with saying "good morning" to each other. By and by we started walking together. He started asking about me, what subject I was studying, what I was doing, and slowly, slowly the distance of age disappeared. He started inviting me for tea after the walk. And he became interested in my ideology, because whenever I saw that he was saying something which I could not accept I simply rejected it and produced every possible argument against it. He loved it.

    He said, "You should not have joined philosophy." He himself was a legal man, he was a world-famous law expert. He said, "You should have gone into law because you, without knowing law, argue with me and I can see that if we were in a court you would win."

    But I said to him, "It is just a mind game. I can argue for, I can argue against; mind is ready for both."

    He said, "Strange...that reminds me of one of the incidents in my own life." upan05

    He was a lawyer, a very great, famous, world famous authority on law; but he was a very forgetful man, very absent minded. Once it happened that in a privy council case in London he was fighting the case for one Indian maharaja. It was a big case. He forgot--and he argued for one hour against his own client. Even the judge became worried. The opposite party advocate couldn't believe what was happening: "Now what is he going to do?"--because all

    the arguments that he had prepared, this man was making. The whole thing was topsy-turvy, and the whole court couldn't believe what was happening. And the man was such an authority that nobody dared to interrupt him; even his own assistant tried many times to pull his coat and tell him what he was doing. When he finished then the assistant whispered in his ear, "What have you done? You have completely destroyed the case. We are not against this man--we are for him!"

    This lawyer said to the judge, "My lord, these are the arguments which can be given against my client--now I will contradict them." And he started contradicting, and he won the case.

    Logic is a prostitute. You can argue for God, and the same argument can be used against God. harmon05

    Doctor Harisingh Gaur, one of the great legal experts of the world, used to say to his students that, "If you have the law in your favor, speak very silently, slowly, be mild, polite--because the law is in your favor, don't be worried. But if the law is not in your favor, then beat the table, speak loudly, with a strong voice. Use words which create an atmosphere of certainty, absoluteness, because the law is not in your favor. You have to create an atmosphere as if the law is in your favor." dh0302

    When I was a student in the university, I used to receive two hundred rupees per month from someone, I knew not who. I had tried every way to find out who the person was. On the first day of each month, the money order was there but there was no name, no address. Only when the person died...and he was no one other than the founder of the university in which I was a student.

    I went to his home. His wife said, "I am worried--not because my husband has died; everybody has to die. My concern is, from where am I going to get two hundred rupees to send you?"

    I said, "My god, your husband has been sending it? I never asked, and there was no need because I am getting a scholarship from the university, free lodging, free boarding-- everything free."

    The wife said, "I also asked him many times: Why do you go on sending two hundred rupees to him? And he said, `He needs it. He loves books but he has no money for books. And his need for books is greater than his need for food."'

    But he was a rare man. In his whole life, whatever he earned he donated to create the university in his town.

    India has almost one thousand universities. I have seen many. His university is small; it is a small place. But his university is the most beautiful--on a hilltop surrounded by great trees, and below it such a big lake full of lotus flowers...the lake is so big that you cannot see the other shore. And I came to know that he had given everything to the university. Nobody was asking, nobody was even expecting that in that small place there would be a great university.

    He was a world-known legal expert. He had offices in London, in New Delhi, in Peking; he was continuously on the move.

    I had asked him, "Why have you chosen this place?"

    He said, "I have gone all over the world and I have never seen such a beautiful small hill, with big trees, with such a beautiful lake, with so many lotuses. " The whole lake is covered with

    flowers and lotus leaves. In the early morning, on all the lotus petals. dewdrops gather in the

    night...in the morning you can see--that lake is the richest in the world because each dewdrop shines like a diamond.

    He had taken me around the place and he said, "It is not a question of my town, it is a question of the beauty of this place."

    But I had never imagined that he would be sending me two hundred rupees per month, unsigned. So I cannot even send him a thank you note. mess110

    Osho’s friend and professor, Dr. S.S. Roy

    I am reminded of one of my professors. He is a very beautiful man: Professor S.S.Roy. Now he is retired as head of the department of philosophy from Allahabad University. The first day I joined his class, he was explaining the concept of The Absolute. He was an authority on Bradley and Shankara. Both believe in The Absolute--that is their name for God.

    I asked him one thing which made me very intimate to him, and he opened his whole heart to me, in every possible way. I just asked, "Is your 'absolute' perfect? Has it come to a full stop or is it still growing? If it is still growing, then it is not absolute, it is imperfect--only then can it grow. If something more is possible, some more branches, some more flowers--then it is alive. If it is complete, entirely complete--that's the meaning of the word absolute: now there is no possibility for growth--then it is dead." So I asked him, "Be clear, because 'absolute' represents to Bradley and Shankara, God; that is their philosophical name for God. Is your God alive or dead? You have to answer me this question."

    He was really an honest man. He said, "Please give me time to think." He had a doctorate on Bradley from Oxford, another doctorate on Shankara from Benares, and he was thought to be the greatest authority on these two philosophers because he had tried to prove that Bradley, from the West, and Shankara, from the East, have come to the same conclusion. He said, "Please give me time to think."

    I said, "Your whole life you have been writing about Bradley and Shankara and 'the absolute'-

    -I have read your books, I have read your unpublished thesis. And you have been teaching here your whole life--has nobody ever asked you such a simple question?"

    He said, "Nobody ever asked me; not only that, even I have never thought about it--that, certainly, if something is perfect then it has to be dead. Anything alive has to be imperfect. This idea has never occurred to me. So please give me time."

    I said, "You can take as much time as you want. I will come every day and ask the same question." And it continued for five, six days. Every day I would enter the class and he would come shaking, and I would stand up and say, "My question."

    And he said, "Please forgive me, I cannot decide. With both the ways there is difficulty. I cannot say God is imperfect; I cannot say God is dead. But you have conquered my heart."

    He removed my things from the hostel to his house. He said, "No more, you cannot live in the hostel. You have to come and live with my family, with me. I have much to learn from you-- because such a simple question has not occurred to me. All my degrees you have canceled."

    I lived with him for almost six months before he moved to another university. He wanted me to move with him to another university, but my vice-chancellor was reluctant. He said, "Professor Roy, you can go. Professors will come and go, but we may not find such a student again. So I am not going to give him his certificates and I am not going to allow him to leave the university. And I will write to your university, where you are going, that my student should not be taken in there either."

    But he remained loving to me. It was a rare phenomenon: he used to come almost every month to see me from his university, almost two hundred miles away from my university. But he would come at least once every month just to see me, just to sit with me. And he said, "Now I am getting a better salary and everything is more comfortable there, but I miss you. The class seems to be dead. Nobody asks questions like you, which cannot be answered."

    And I had told him, "This is an agreement between me and you, that I only call a question a question which cannot be answered. If it can be answered, what kind of a question is it?"

    God--perfect, absolute, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent; these are the words used for God by all the religions--is dead, cannot be alive, cannot breathe. No, I reject such a god, because with such a dead god, this whole universe will be dead.

    Godliness is a totally different dimension.

    Then the greenness in the tree, then the flowering of the rose, then the bird in flight--all are part of it. Then God is not separate from the universe. Then he is the very soul of the universe. Then the universe is vibrating, pulsating, breathing...godliness.

    So I am not an atheist, but I am not a theist either. And there is a third term also, which is 'agnostic'. Socrates, Bertrand Russell, people like this are agnostic. An agnostic means one who says, "I don't know whether God is, or God is not." unconc03

    One of my professors, Professor S.S. Roy, did not agree with me, that something can be created by other people when it is not there at all. So I said, "I will show it to you."

    I was very much loved by the man; his wife was also very loving towards me. I went to his wife and told her, "Tomorrow morning when the professor gets up, you have to pretend that you are shocked, and say to him, `What has happened to you? When you went to bed you were perfectly okay; now your face is looking pale. Are you sick or something?'"

    The next morning the professor simply denied it. He said, "What nonsense are you talking? I am perfectly okay."

    I had told his gardener, "When he comes into the garden, you simply say, `My God! What has happened to you? You cannot walk, you are wobbling. Something is wrong with you. Just go inside and rest and I will go and call the doctor.'"

    And I had said to both these people, "Whatsoever he says, exactly in his own words, you write it down. I will collect those notes."

    To the gardener he said, "Yes, it seems something is wrong. Perhaps I should rest, I should not go to the university. But I don't see any need to call the doctor." He was perfectly healthy and there was no problem, so finally he decided that at least for half an hour or an hour he would go to the university.

    On the way I had said to many people whom I trusted.... On the way there was the postmaster. I told him, "Even if you are busy, don't miss: when the professor passes by you shout at him, `What are you doing? Where are you going? Are you mad? Your body is absolutely sick! You come into my house, rest. I will call the doctor.'" I collected all these notes. The professor said, "Yes, since last night I have this feeling that something is going wrong. I am not exactly sure what is going wrong, but something is wrong. I feel a certain trembling inside, a fear, as if I am not going to last long."

    His house and the university philosophy department were almost one mile apart, and he had always walked--but that day, in the middle, he stopped another professor's car and told him, "I don't think I will be able to reach the university department."

    The university was on a hilly place, up and down. From his house it was an uphill task to reach the department; the department was on the top of the hill and his house was in the valley.

    He said, "I am huffing, huffing...my body is trembling. I think there is fever, and there is much more which I cannot figure out." So he wanted a lift.

    And the professor who had passed him was sent by me: "Just when he is in a very bad situation, you stop your car and ask, `What is the matter?'" In the car he said, "You should not have come, you should have called the doctor. Your eyes look as if they have lost all luster. Your face looks dry, faded; you look like a faded painting. Just in one night! Had you a heart attack in the night? It must have been serious."

    And he said, "It seems that I had a heart attack and I was not aware because I was asleep, but now I know. All the symptoms are showing that my life is at the very end."

    When he entered the university department, the peon who used to sit in front of the department. I had told him, "When he comes, you simply jump and hold him."

    He said, "But he will be very angry. And what kind of thing are you asking? You have never asked anything before."

    I said, "We are doing an experiment--me and the professor. Don't interfere, you simply do what I say. You just hold him and tell him, `You are going to fall.'" He did that and the professor thanked him. And the peon had no need to tell him that he was going to fall; the professor said himself, "If you had not been here I would have fallen."

    Inside the department I was waiting for him. I said, "Jesus! You look like a ghost! What calamity has happened to you?" I took hold of him, put him in a reclining chair.

    And he said, "Just one thing I want to tell you. My children are small"--he had only two children--"my wife is young, inexperienced. I don't have any family; my father is dead, my mother is dead. I don't know anybody who can take care of them when I am gone. I can think only of you."

    I said, "You don't be worried. I will take care of your children, your wife--better than you are doing. But before you decide to leave the world, I have to show you a few notes."

    He said, "A few. what notes?"

    I said, "I will have to go and collect them." He said, "From whom?"

    I said "From your wife, from the gardener, from the postmaster, from the professor who drove you here, from the peon who saved you from falling."

    He said, "But how do you know?"

    I said, "It was all planned. And you say that man cannot be deceived by something nonexistential?"

    I went down, collected all the notes, and I showed him them one by one. And I said, "Look how you are getting caught up. To your wife you absolutely denied there was anything wrong. To the gardener you said `Perhaps something is wrong.' But it was "perhaps," you were not certain yet. But the idea was getting in. To the postmaster you said, `Yes, something must have happened. From the very evening I was feeling bad, sick, apprehensive.'

    "With the professor in the car you accepted that you must have had a heart attack while you were asleep. You were feeling so weak"--and he was a strong man--"that you could not conceive yourself walking uphill to the department. And to the peon who jumped and took hold of you, you said, `I am grateful to you. I was just going to fail, to collapse.' Now this is a simple idea," I told him, "that has been implanted in you."

    Now do you see the point? This man can even die, you just have to keep on going. I was only proving a point on which he was not agreeing, so this was only an argument--I did not want him to die. Otherwise, I would have talked to the doctor and had him say to him, "Your days are finished, so whatever you want to do--write your will or anything--do it quickly. It is not something that I can help with, your heart is simply finished; any moment it is going to stop." I could have killed that man just by an idea.

    Seeing the notes, immediately he was back, perfectly healthy. He walked down the hill laughing, and told the peon, "You should not listen to this man, he is dangerous. He almost killed me!" He told the other professor, "This is not right, that you suggested to me that I must have had a heart attack." He told the postmaster, "You are my neighbor, and is this right, to push me towards death?"

    He was very angry with his wife. He said, "I can think that he persuaded other people--he has everybody impressed by him--but I cannot believe that my own wife deceived me, listened to him. We were in an argument; it was a question of my prestige, and you destroyed it!" But the wife said, "You should be grateful to him. He has given proof that man can be programmed for something which does not exist at all."

    You think you are a Christian? It is just an idea implanted in you. Do you think there is a God? An idea implanted in you. Do you think there is a heaven and hell? It is nothing but programming. You are all programmed.

    My work with you is to deprogram you. And I am showing you all the notes--day after day, continuously--that these are the things that have made you almost dull, stupid, even attracted towards suicide, towards death. My religion is unique in this way: all the religions of the past have programmed people; I deprogram you, and then I leave you alone, to yourself. false19

    Osho’s professor, Dr. S.K. Saxena

    I used to walk in an Indian sandal which is made of wood. It has been used by sannyasins for centuries, almost ten thousand years or perhaps longer. A wooden sandal...because it avoids any kind of leather, which is bound to be coming from an animal who maybe has been killed, killed only for this purpose--and the best leather comes from very young children of animals. So sannyasins have been avoiding that, and using a wooden sandal. But it makes so much noise when the sannyasin walks, you can hear from almost half a mile away that he is coming. And on a cement road or walking on the verandah in the university...the whole university knows.

    The whole university used to know me, know that I was coming or going; there was no need to see me, just my sandals were enough. ignor21

    When on the first day I entered the university's philosophy class, I met Doctor Saxena for the first time. Only for a few professors did I have really great love and respect. These two were my most loved professors--Doctor S.K. Saxena and Doctor S.S.Roy--and for the simple reason that they never treated me like a student.

    When I entered Doctor Saxena's class the first day, with my wooden sandals, he looked a little puzzled. He looked at my sandals and asked me, "Why are you using wooden sandals?-

    -they make so much noise." I said, "Just to keep my consciousness alert."

    He said, "Consciousness? Are you trying to keep your consciousness alert in other ways too?"

    I said, "Twenty-four hours a day I am trying to do that, in every possible way: walking, sitting, eating, even sleeping. And you may believe it or you may not, that just lately I have succeeded to be aware and alert even in sleep."

    He said, "The class is dismissed--you just come with me to the office." The whole class thought I had created trouble for myself the first day. He took me into his office and took from the shelf his thesis for a doctorate that he had written thirty years before. It was on consciousness. He said, "Take it. It has been published in English, and so many people in India have asked to translate it into Hindi--great scholars, knowing both languages, English and Hindi, perfectly well. But I have not allowed anybody, because the question is not whether you know the language well or not; I was looking for a man who knows what consciousness is--and I can see in your eyes, on your face, by the way you answered...you have to translate this book."

    I said, "This is difficult because I don't know English much, I don't know Hindi much either. Hindi is my mother tongue, but I know only as much as everybody knows his mother tongue. And I believe in the definition of the mother tongue. Why is every language called the mother tongue?--because the mother speaks and the father listens--and that's how the children learn. That's how I have learned.

    "My father is a silent man; my mother speaks and he listens--and I learned the language. It is just a mother tongue, I don't know much; Hindi has never been my subject of study. English I

    know just a little bit, and that is enough for your so-called examinations, but for translating a book which is a Ph.D. thesis. And you are giving it to a student?"

    He said, "Don't be worried--l know you will be able to do it."

    I said, "lf you trust me, I will do my best. But one thing I must tell you, that if I find something wrong in it then I am going to make an editorial note underneath, putting a star on it, that this is wrong, and how it should be. If I find something missing, I am going to put a star again and a footnote that something is missing, and this is the part that is missing."

    He said, "l agree to that. I know there are many things missing in it. But you surprise me: you have not even seen the book, you have not even opened it. How do you know that things will be missing in it?"

    I said, "Looking at you. in the way you can see by looking at me, that I am the right person to

    translate it, I can see perfectly, Doctor Saxena, you are not the right person to write it!"

    And he loved that so much that he told it to everybody. The whole university knew about it-- this dialogue that had happened between me and him. In the next two-month summer vacation I translated the book, and I made those editorial notes. When I showed him, there were tears of joy in his eyes.

    He said, "I knew perfectly well that something is missing here, but I could not figure it out because I have never practiced it. I was just trying to collect all the information about consciousness in Eastern scriptures. I had collected a lot, and then from that I started sorting it out. It took me almost seven years to finish my thesis." He had done really a great scholarly job--but only scholarly. I said, "It is scholarly, but it is not the work of a meditator. And I have made all these notes--that this can be written only by a scholar, not by a meditator."

    He looked at all those pages and he said to me, "If you had been one of my examiners for the thesis I would not have got the doctorate! You have found exactly the right places that I was doubtful about, but those fools who examined it were not even suspicious. It has been praised very much."

    He was a professor in America for many years, and his book is really a monumental work of scholarship; but nobody criticized him, nobody has pointed. So I asked him, "Now what are

    you going to do with the translation?"

    He said, "I cannot publish it. I have found a translator--but you are more an examiner than a translator! I will keep it but I cannot publish it. With your notes and with your editorial commentary it will destroy my whole reputation--but I agree with you. In fact," he said, "if it were in my power I would have given you a doctorate just for your editorial notes and footnotes, because you have found exactly the places which only a meditator can find; a non- meditator has no way to find them."

    So my whole life from the very beginning has been concerned with two things: never to allow any unintelligent thing to be imposed upon me, to fight against all kinds of stupidities, whatsoever the consequences, and to be rational, logical, to the very end. This was one side, that I was using with all those people with whom I was in contact. And the other was absolutely private, my own: to become more and more alert, so that I didn't end up just being an intellectual. misery01

    One of my professors, Dr S.K. Saxena, he was the head of the department of Philosophy and I was his student. But he won't allow me to live in the hostels and it was a little embarrassing for me, for the simple reason because he was a drunkard, gambler, a very nice man and has never lived with his family...his family was living in Delhi, because he could not tolerate anybody.

    And I feel embarrassed because he will take me to his house and then he will not drink, just out of respect and love for me. And I knew that it will be too difficult for him, he is an old man and he is not just occasional drunkard, he is a drunkard, he needs every day otherwise he cannot live.

    So I told him that, "I can come with the condition that you will not change anything in your life because of me. You will have to continue whatever you do...if you want to drink, you drink, just the way, as if I am not there."

    He said, "That is the difficulty. I take you there because when you are there I don't need the drink. You are a nourishment to me. When you are in my house I feel my house has become your home otherwise I am just living in a house. I have never had a home. My wife is there, my children are there, but somehow that atmosphere never happened that becomes immediately possible the moment you enter into my house.

    "You are sleeping into another room, I am sleeping into another room but I sleep so deeply when you are in my room, and without drinking. So don't think that I am making any obligation on you to take you from the hostel to my bungalow, which is more comfortable in every possible way...no. You are making an obligation on me. I feel so nourished."

    He said to me, that "When you are there I don't eat so much as I eat every day and my doctor goes on telling me: `not to eat too much, you are old, you have diabetes, you are a drunkard. That drinking is killing you, that drinking is making your diabetes worse and you go on eating and you love sweets and you love delicious food.' But when you are there, simply my appetite is not there, I feel full. What the doctor has not been able to do in years, you have not even told me."

    In fact, I used to tell him, that "Doctor you should eat something. Only I am eating and you are just sitting there."

    He said, "I know, but there is no appetite and I am feeling very good."

    Not only you will start feeling changes, others will start feeling changes. All that is to be remembered is a simple word: witnessing. last511

    Jabalpur has one of the most beautiful spots in the world. For two to three miles continuously a beautiful river, Narmada, flows between two mountains of marble...just three miles of pure white marble on both sides, high mountains. And the river is deep. On a full-moon night, when the moon comes in the middle and you can see those rocks also reflected into the waters, it creates almost a magical world. I don't think there is anything in the world which can be compared to that magic. It is simply unimaginable.

    I insisted again and again to my professor, Doctor S.K. Saxena...I had loved him very much because he was the only teacher I came across who never treated me as a student. We argued, we fought on small points, and if he was wrong he was always ready to accept it, and he was grateful....

    I said, "...now you have to come with me to Jabalpur." It was one hundred miles from the university where he was professor, to the marble rocks. "I would not let you die without seeing it."

    But he said, "Howsoever beautiful it is, I have seen the whole world"--he had been a world traveler--"I have seen everything that is worth seeing. What can be there?"

    I said, "I cannot describe. you just come with me." And I took him there. He was asking again

    and again, when we were moving in the boat, "Do you call this the most beautiful place?"

    I said, "You just wait. We have not entered into it yet." And then suddenly the boat entered into the world of marble, the mountains of marble. And in the full-moon night they were just so pure, so virgin-pure, and their reflections. The old man had tears in his eyes. He said, "If you

    had not insisted, I would have missed something in my life. Just take the boat close to the mountains, because I would like to touch then. It looks so illusory! Without touching I cannot believe that what I am seeing is real."

    I told the boatman to come close to the mountains. He touched the mountains, and he said, "Now I can leave--they are real! But for three miles continuously. !"

    This man wrote beautifully, spoke beautifully, but still was miserable. And I said, "Neither your writings mean anything, nor your speeches mean anything. To me what is significant is whether you have been able to drop all the causes of misery. You are so miserable that you drink, just to forget. You are so miserable that you smoke, just to forget. You gamble, just to forget."

    Now, this world is not to be renounced. There are beautiful people, there are immensely capable people; they just have never come across a person who could have triggered a process of mutation in their life....

    I told you about this beautiful spot because in Jabalpur there are thousands of people who have not seen it. It is only thirteen miles away, and I have asked those people--professors, doctors, engineers--"Just go and see!"

    And they say, "We can see it anytime. It is there; it is not going to go away." Psycho17

    Other professors

    I had once a friend who was a professor, and I have been his student also. For my postgraduate studies I was his student, and then when I also became a professor in the same university we became colleagues. But our friendship was old, since my student days. He had the idea that to see a woman is the greatest sin. Now he was a well-qualified professor. He

    used to walk with his umbrella covering his eyes, so that he could see only two or three feet ahead. And he used to run so fast--his bungalow and the department were not very far apart. With his umbrella touching his head he would run almost to his house and lock his house from inside.

    In the class I was the only male; there were two female students. There were only three persons in his class. He could not look at women; it was against his religion which believed that celibacy is the foundation of religion.

    So he used to teach with closed eyes. Seeing him teach with closed eyes, I thought this was a good opportunity to have a good sleep. So I was also sitting with closed eyes. Those two girls wondered...and they felt strange also: the teacher is asleep--with closed eyes he is speaking; the only male student is listening with closed eyes....

    The professor thought that I must be following the same ideology of celibacy. He was very happy, because in the university he was laughed at. Now at least there were two persons belonging to the same idea. He took me aside one day and he said, "You are doing it perfectly well. But how do you manage on the road?--because I don't see you carrying the umbrella."

    I said, "To tell you the truth I don't belong to your madness. I'm simply sleeping; this is my time to sleep. My whole life I have slept from twelve to two without any exception."

    Even in school I used to disappear for those two hours. In the university I used to disappear, and when I became a professor I asked the vice-chancellor, "These two hours are absolutely sacred to me. You can give me periods before or after, but these two hours you cannot touch."

    He said, "What is the matter?"

    I said, "The matter is that these two hours are devoted to sleep. If you give me a period I will sleep--and I will tell all the students to fall asleep, to just keep quiet and silent and enjoy."

    So he gave me periods after two o'clock.

    I told the professor--Bhattacharya was his name--"You are under a wrong impression. I don't believe in such idiotic ideas, because with your closed eyes you are seeing the woman more. What are you seeing with your eyes closed? And in fact, why have you closed the eyes? You must have seen the woman first, then only can you close your eyes. And if in seeing a woman your celibacy is disturbed, it is not much of a celibacy. What will you do in a dream?"

    He said, "You are right. In a dream I cannot do anything. Neither is the umbrella there...and the eyes are already closed--the women are inside. Do you have any suggestion?"

    I said, "Because of this umbrella and because of these closed eyes your dreams are disturbed by women. If you drop this idiotic discipline that you have imposed upon yourself...Women have their own business. Who is bothering to come into your dreams?"

    He said, "No, my father followed the same ideology, my forefathers..."--he was a brahmin from Bengal--"and I cannot drop it, although I know the whole university thinks me mad."

    But others have their own madness. It may be different, may not be detectable if everybody has it, but to be sane there is only one possibility and that comes out of meditation; otherwise, whatever you do is going to be insane because it will be coming out of your unconsciousness. You will not be doing it in your alertness, in your awareness. invita29

    One of my teachers was a very rare being. He was a little eccentric as philosophers tend to be. He was one of the greatest philosophers of this century in India. Very rare, not much known--a real philosopher, not simply a professor of philosophy. He was very much eccentric.

    Students had long dropped coming to his classes when I came across him. For many years nobody had entered into his class because sometimes he would talk continuously for three, four, five, six hours. And he used to say: 'The university can decide when the period starts, but the university cannot decide when it stops, because that depends on my flow. If something is incomplete, I cannot leave it. I have to complete it.'

    So it was very disturbing. He would take the whole time sometimes. And sometimes he would not say a single thing for weeks. He would say: 'Nothing is coming. You go home.'

    When I entered his class, he looked at me and he said: 'Yes. You may fit with me. You also look a little eccentric. But remember: when I start talking, whenever it stops, it stops. I never manipulate. Sometimes I will not be talking for weeks; you will have to come and go. Sometimes I will talk for hours. Then if you feel uneasy, if you want to go to the bathroom or something, you can go--but don't disturb me. I will continue. You can come back. Silently, you can sit again. I will continue because I cannot break it in between.'

    It was a rare experience to listen to him. He was completely oblivious of me, the only student. Rarely would he look at me. Sometimes he would look at the walls and talk. And he was saying profound things with such a deep heart that it was not a question of addressing someone; he was enjoying. Sometimes he would chuckle and enjoy, his own thing he would enjoy. And many times I would go out and talk to people. After minutes, after even hours sometimes, he was there. And he had been talking. sage05

    One of my professors, a professor of economics, was built almost like a wrestler, a very big man, but inside a chicken. I was very friendly with him. In fact, he had to be friendly with me, because that was the time when the medium of expression was changing. From English it was becoming Hindi. So he was accustomed to speaking English, but many times he would get stuck with some word, and I was his only hope--that I would supply him the right word in Hindi.

    I used to give him right words, but once in a while I would...

    Once he got stuck with the word `haggling'. He looked at me, and I was in the right mood, so I said, "It means chikallas." Chikallas really means joking with each other, not haggling. Haggling is debating over the price.

    So he started using the word chikallas: "When you go into the market and you start

    chikallas..." and the whole class laughed. He looked at me, "What is the matter?" I said, "I don't know what is the matter. Why are these people laughing?"

    He said, "There is something, because whenever I say 'chikallas' they start laughing." I said, "This is chikallas--when you say something and people start laughing!"

    He said, "I thought you were my friend! I have been depending on you for translations, and you give me such a word?"

    I said, "I was in the right mood! When I am in the right mood, you should not ask me anything." christ08

    I had a professor when I was a student at university. He was a world-famous chemist, and his idea was this: that chemistry is the only real science. And one day will come when all other sciences will disappear, because chemistry can explain everything. It can explain life, it can explain love, it can explain poetry--because reduced to facts, all is chemical. Existence is chemical.

    One day I was following him--he was unaware--he had gone for a walk. It was a full-moon night. He was holding his wife's hand, and I followed him. I didn't allow him to know that I was there. It was a full-moon night, and he forgot that he is a chemistry professor and a great chemist, and he kissed the wife...and I said "Stop!" He was shocked. And when he saw me he said, "What do you mean by 'stop'? It is my wife."

    "That is not the point," I said. "But what are you doing?--this is just chemistry. And a man of your understanding kissing a woman? Just a small chemical transfer from here to there? Just a few germs from her lips to your lips, from your lips to her lips? What are you doing? Are you affected by the moon? Have you become a lunatic or something? And why are you holding her hand? How can you explain it chemically?"

    But there are people who are trying to explain things chemically, physically, electrically. They only destroy life's mystery.

    I told the professor, "Whenever you kiss your wife, remember me, and remember your philosophy."

    After three, four weeks, I saw him again and I said, "How are things going?"

    And he said, "You have disturbed me very much--because it really happens. When I kiss my wife, I remember you. "

    Life is not reducible to chemistry, is not reducible to logical syllogism. Life is far bigger. Its mystery is infinite. Only love can understand it. Only love has that infinity to cope with it. Everything else is very finite. Only love can dare to move into the indefinable, to move into the subtle. perf205

    I myself have been very interested in painting. From my very childhood I started many paintings but not a single painting have I left intact. I have burned all of them.

    One of my professors was a painter himself. I used to visit his studio, and I used to say sometimes, "This seems to be wrong. If you do a little change here then the whole impact of the painting will be different."

    He started asking me, "Are you a painter?--because whatsoever you suggest, reluctantly I do it, and certainly it improves the painting. And by and by I have dropped my reluctance. I simply accept your suggestion. But this is possible only if you are a painter...because there are so many people coming here. Even my own students who are painters never suggest that this is wrong; just a slight change will do a miracle. And it does. So you have to explain to me the truth."

    And I don't know why Sagar University in India. I have traveled all over India continually for

    thirty years, but I have never seen such colors in the sky as happens over the lake by the side of the university in Sagar. Never have I seen anywhere such splendor; the sunrise, the sunset, are just divine. without there being any God.

    I painted, and destroyed my paintings. Only a few friends have seen them. I allowed this professor to see a few of my paintings. He said, "You are mad--these paintings are far superior to mine. You can earn so much money, you can become world famous.

    I said, "I accept your first statement. You said, `You are mad'--I am! That's why I am not going to leave these footprints of a madman for others to travel and follow." I have destroyed all those.

    I love poetry. I have written poetry. But I continued to destroy it. My basic standpoint was that unless I am no more, whatever I do is going to harm others. This is the Eastern way.

    Now it is unfortunate that when I disappeared, the desire to paint or to make a statue or to compose poetry all disappeared too. Perhaps they were just part of that madman who died. And I am happy that nothing of it survives. dark27

    The scholars are so clever in destroying all that is beautiful by their commentaries, interpretations, by their so-called learning. They make everything so heavy that even poetry with them becomes non-poetic.

    I myself never attended any poetry class in the university. I was called again and again by the head of the department, that 'You attend other classes, why you don't come to the poetry classes?"

    I said, "Because I want to keep my interest in poetry alive. I love poetry, that's why. And I know perfectly well that your professors are absolutely unpoetic; they have never known any poetry in their life. I know them perfectly well. The man who teaches poetry in the university goes for a morning walk with me every day. I have never seen him looking at the trees, listening to the birds, seeing the beautiful sunrise."

    And in the university where I was, the sunrise and the sunset were something tremendously beautiful. The university was on a small hillock surrounded by small hills all around. I have never come across...I have traveled all over this country; I have never seen more beautiful sunsets and sunrises anywhere. For some unknown mysterious reason Sagar University seems to have a certain situation where clouds become so colorful at the time of sunrise and sunset that even a blind man will become aware that something tremendously beautiful is happening.

    But I have never seen the professor who teaches poetry in the university to look at the sunset, to stop even for a single moment. And whenever he sees me watching the sunset or the sunrise or the trees or the birds, he asks me, "Why you are sitting here? You have come for a morning walk--do your exercise!"

    I told him that, "This is not exercise for me. You are doing exercise; with me it is a love affair."

    And when it rains he never comes. And whenever it rains I will go and knock at his door and tell him, "Come on!"

    He will say, "But it is raining!"

    I said, "That's the most beautiful time to go for a walk, because the streets are absolutely empty. And to go for a walk without any umbrella while it is raining is so beautiful, is so poetic!"

    He thinks I am mad, but a man who has never gone in the rains under the trees cannot understand poetry. I told to the head of the department that, "This man is not poetic; he destroys everything. He is so scholarly and poetry is such an unscholarly phenomenon that there is no meeting ground between the two."

    Universities destroy people's interest and love for poetry. They destroy your whole idea of how a life should be; they make it more and more a commodity. They teach you how to earn more, but they don't teach you how to live deeply, how to live totally. And these are the ways from where you can get glimpses of Tao. These are the ways from where small doors and windows open into the ultimate. You are told the value of money but not the value of a rose flower. You are told the value of being a prime minister or a president but not the value of being a poet, a painter, a singer, a dancer. Those things are thought to be for crazy people. And they are the ways from where one slips slowly into Tao. ggate06

    We have been given such a beautiful existence with such glorious seasons. In the fall, when the leaves start falling from the trees, have you heard the song? When the wind passes through the dead leaves which have gathered on the ground...even the dead leaves are not as dead as man has become; still they can sing. They don't complain that the tree has dropped them. They go with nature wherever it leads. And this is the way of a true religious heart: no complaint, no grudge but just being blissful for all that existence has given to you-- which you had not asked for, which you had not earned.

    Have you danced while it is raining? No, you have created umbrellas. And it is not only against the rain...you have created many umbrellas to protect you from the constant creativity of existence.

    When I was a student in the university, whenever it used to rain it was an absolute certainty that I would leave the class, and my professors became aware that "When it is raining, you cannot stop him. He has to go." And I had found the loneliest street, with tall trees reaching and touching the clouds. On that silent and deserted road, there were only a few bungalows belonging to professors and deans, and the vice chancellor. It was a silent place and it was a dead-end street.

    The last bungalow belonged to the head of the department of physics. His family had become accustomed to it, that if I was there, the rain was bound to come; or if it was raining, I was bound to come. We had become simultaneous, to the family.

    The whole family used to look--"What kind of crazy boy is this?" Soaked in the falling rain, in the dancing winds...and because that was the dead-end, I used to stay under a tree as long as it continued to rain. The family was certainly curious. They wanted to inquire, "Who is this boy?" But the head of the department of physics had become interested in me for other

    reasons. He was a lover of books and he always found me in the library. There were days when we were the only two persons in the library.

    He started becoming more and more loving and friendly towards me and he said, "You are a little strange. You should be in your class, but I see you most of the time in the library."

    I said, "In the class, the professor is almost always out of date. He is saying things which he read when he was in the university thirty years ago. In these thirty years, everything has changed. I want to keep pace with the growing wisdom, knowledge, science. In fact, in the library I am more a contemporary, in touch with the latest findings. So I go to class once in a while when I feel a desire to argue. My professors are happy that I remain in the library because whenever I visit their classes, it is always trouble. There is a gap of thirty years and I have all the latest information."

    He said, "One day I would like to take you to my home. I want you to be introduced to my children, my wife, to show them that here is a student who has come to the university not for degrees but to learn; not for certificates and gold medals but to keep in tune with the explosion of knowledge in all directions, in all dimensions. Sometimes, even although I am the head of the department of physics and you have nothing to do with physics, you know more than I know. Now it is too late to cover the gap of thirty years; I have lost contact."

    So one day he invited me. He was feeling that his family would be immensely happy to meet me, to talk with me, to listen to what I had to say. But he was very much shocked--as we entered his house, the whole family started laughing, and they escaped inside the house!

    He said, "This is very strange. They have never done this before. My wife is a postgraduate, all my children are getting educated. This is not a behavior. "

    I said, "You don't know; I know your family, we are well acquainted. Although we have not spoken to each other, we have known each other for two years."

    He said, "This is strange. I wasn't even aware of the fact."

    I said, "Don't be worried and don't feel sad and sorry and hurt by the behavior of your family. What they have done is absolutely right."

    We entered, and the family gathered. He asked them: "What was the reason for you all to start laughing and why did you all escape? Is this a way to welcome a guest? And I had informed you that I was bringing a guest that you would all love."

    They said, "But we are almost in love with the guest already. He's the craziest fellow in your university. Not only does he waste his time, when it rains, he wastes our time too because we cannot go inside until he leaves. He's an interesting fellow."

    Then I explained to him that I loved running miles against the wind--one feels so alive--going for long walks without any umbrella, particularly when it is raining. Even when it is a hot day

    and the sun is throwing fire, it has its own beauty--to perspire and then to have a jump in the lake. The water feels so cool, just the contrast.

    One who understands life will not be left behind. mess113

    Fellow Students

    It happened...I used to be a roommate in my university with another student. We had lived together for six months, and he had never stuttered. I had never even thought.... And then one day his father came to visit, and he immediately started stuttering. I was amazed. When his father had gone I asked, "What has happened to you?"

    He said, "This is my problem. From my very childhood he has been such a hard disciplinarian, such a perfectionist, that he created only fear, never love. And because we used to live in a very small village where there was no school, he was my first teacher too; and that is my undoing--my whole life he spoiled, because of his fear. Under his fear I started learning language, speaking language, and everything was wrong, because everything was imperfect."

    A small child is not to be expected to be perfect. He needs all kinds of support. Instead of getting support, he was beaten. The stuttering became a fixed phenomenon in him--not only about the father, but about any father-figure. In the temple--because God is called "Father"-- he could not pray without stuttering. He was a Christian, and he could not speak to the bishop without stuttering, because first he had to address the bishop as "Father." The moment the word "father" came into his mind, all the associations of fear, of being beaten....

    I said, "You do one thing. You start calling me `Father.'" He said, "What?"

    I said, "I am trying to help you. I am certainly not your father, neither am I a bishop, nor am I God the father who created the world--I am just your roommate. You start calling me father, and let us see how long the old association continues."

    He said, "It looks absurd to call you father--you are younger than me." I said, "It doesn't matter."

    "But," he said, "the idea is appealing."

    I said, "You try." And he started trying. In the beginning he stuttered, but slowly, slowly-- because he knew that I am not his father, and it became just a game that he would call me

    father--after three to four months his stuttering disappeared. Now, I was not his father; it was just a device, very arbitrary, it was not in any way true--but it helped.

    When next time his father came he looked at me. I gave him the indication, "You start." His father was amazed, and he said, "What happened to you? You are not stuttering."

    He said, "I don't stutter even in the church, I don't stutter even praying to God the Father. Why should I stutter before you? But my real father is sitting here. The whole credit goes to him. He has suffered my stuttering for four months continuously, but he went on encouraging me, `Don't be worried. It is ninety-nine percent now, it is ninety-eight percent now.' And slowly, slowly it disappeared. And one day he said, `Now there is no need; you can speak to anybody without stuttering. Your fear has disappeared--by a false device." mess211

    In the university I had to live for a few days with a roommate. I had never lived with anybody but there was no space and the vice-chancellor said to me, "For a few days you manage and I will find some other place for you. I can understand that you will not like anybody to be in the room, and it is good for the other fellow also that he is not in your room, because you may drive him crazy. I will arrange it."

    But before he arranged it, it took four, five months. And that man was a very good boy; he just had one problem--just one, so you cannot say that it was a big trouble--he was a kleptomaniac. Just for sheer joy he would steal my things. I had to search for my things in his suitcases, and I would find them, but I never said anything to him.

    He was puzzled. He would use my clothes. When I was not in the room he would just take anything. He would take my shawl and go for a walk, so when I came back the shawl would be gone. I would say, "It will come back, soon it will return." To save money from being taken by him I used to deposit it with him and say, "You keep this money, because if I keep it you will take it anyway. And then it will be difficult to know how much you have taken and how to ask you for it. It looks awkward. You just take it. It is this much: you take it!"

    He said, "You are clever. This way I have to return the whole money whenever you need it."

    But after four, five months...because whenever and wherever he was, with whomsoever he lived--his family or friends, or in the hostels--everybody was condemning him. But I never said anything to him--instead of looking into my suitcases I just looked into his. It was simple! It was not very different; my suitcases were in this corner, his suitcases were in that corner.

    He said, "You are strange. I have been stealing your things and you never say anything."

    I said, "It is a very small problem. It can't create distrust in me for a human being. And what trouble is there? Rather than going to my suitcase, I simply go to your suitcase, and in your suitcase I find whatsoever I need."

    He said, "That's why I was wondering...that I go on stealing from you, you never say anything, and those things disappear from my suitcases again! So I was thinking that perhaps you also are a kleptomaniac."

    I said, "That is perfectly okay. If you stop taking from my suitcases, I will stop taking from your suitcases. And remember, in this whole game you have been losing."

    He said, "What do you mean?"

    I said, "I take a few things that are not mine"--because he was stealing from everywhere, other rooms, professors' houses; anywhere he would find any window open, he would jump in. And there was no intention of stealing, just the joy of it, just the challenge; an opportunity and challenge that nobody could catch hold of him.

    I said, "I will never prevent you. You can go on moving my things, you can move my whole suitcase under your bed; it doesn't matter. In fact I am perfectly happy with you. I am worried now that soon the vice-chancellor is going to give me a single room. Where will I find a person like you?--because you provide so many things which I need. And I trust you perfectly!" ignor23

    I am reminded of one of my friends. He was an average human being--l mean just an idiot. All the students were continuously talking of falling in love with girls, and this and that and they were asking him--and he was very cowardly, nervous... You cannot conceive of the conditions in India. Even in the university, the girls and the boys are sitting separate. They cannot talk openly, they cannot meet openly...But his heart was beating; he was coming of age. One day he came to me because he thought I was the only person who had never laughed at him, who had never joked about his nervousness, that seeing a girl he starts trembling--actually trembling, you could see his pajamas shaking--and perspiring. Even if it was winter and cold, he would start perspiring.

    He came to me, closed the door, and said, "Only you can help me. What can I do? I would like to love a girl but I cannot even say a single word to a girl. Suddenly, I lose my voice and I start trembling and perspiring." So I had to train him.

    I knew a girl who was in my class, and I told her, "You have to be a little helpful to this poor man. So just be a little kind and compassionate, and when he perspires, you don't mention it. Rather you should say, 'People say that you start perspiring seeing girls, but you are not perspiring, and I am a girl--have you forgotten?--and you are not shaking...' And he will be shaking, but you have to say, 'You are not shaking.'"

    I had to write love letters for him, and he would send those letters. And the girl was prepared by me, and just because I have told her, she was answering him. She would answer the letters, and he would come running to show me the letter and he was so happy just with the letters. And again I said, "Now you start on your own. How long am I to be writing letters for you? And do you know, the other letter also I have written...because the girl says, 'I don't love

    him, how can I write? So you please do this one too!' And she shows your letter to me and you show her letter to me, and I am the one who is writing both the letters!"

    And this phony business, this love affair...but this is what is happening in all the synagogues, temples, churches.

    Your prayers are written by somebody else, perhaps thousands of years before. They are not part of your being; they have not arisen from you. They don't carry any love from you. They don't have your heartbeat.

    You don't know whom you are addressing, whether there exists anybody on the other side or not. That too is written in the same book from which you have taken the prayer: that He exists.

    It is a very circular thing. The same book says God exists, the same book gives you the prayer, the same book says that if you do this prayer you will receive this answer. unconc03

    When I was a student in the university in my final master's course, one girl was very much interested in me. She was a beautiful girl, but my interest was not in women at that time. I was crazy in search of God!

    After the examinations, when she was leaving the university. She had waited--I knew it--she

    had waited and waited for me to approach her. That is the usual way, that the man approaches the woman; it is graceful for the woman not to approach the man. Strange idea. I

    don't understand. Whoever approaches, it is graceful. If fact, whoever initiates is courageous.

    When we were leaving the university she said, "Now there is no chance." She took me aside and said, "For two years continuously I have been waiting. Can't we be together for our whole lives? I love you."

    I said, "If you love me, then please leave me alone. I also love you, that's why I am leaving you alone--because I know what has been happening in the name of love. People are becoming imprisoned, chained; they lose all their joy, life becomes a drag. So this is my parting advice to you," I said, "Never try to cling to a person for your whole life."

    If two persons are willingly together today, it is more than enough. If tomorrow again they feel like being together, good. If they don't, it is their personal affair; nobody has to interfere. false15

    Osho’s Final Examinations, and gold medal

    While I was doing my postgraduate studies the government passed a law that every student has to go for army training, and unless you receive a certificate from the army you will not be given your postgraduate degree.

    I went directly to my vice-chancellor and I said, "You can keep my postgraduate degree, I will not need it. But I cannot go to any kind of idiotic training."

    The army training is basically to destroy your intelligence, because you cannot say no, and if you cannot say no your intelligence starts dying. In the beginning it is a little hard to say yes, but reluctantly you say it. Slowly, slowly you become accustomed to saying yes without thinking at all what you are saying yes to.

    I said, "I am not going to any army training. I don't care about the postgraduate degree, but I cannot conceive myself with somebody ordering me, `Left turn!' and I have to turn left--for no reason at all. `Right turn!' and I have to turn right. `Go forward!...Come backward!' This I cannot do. And if you want me to do it, then inform the military officer that he will have to give me an explanation for everything. Why should I turn left? What is the need?"

    The vice-chancellor said, "Don't create trouble. You just remain silent. I will manage, I will tell the military officer that he has to give you attendance--but don't create trouble, because if you start creating trouble others may start creating trouble. Right now you are the only one who has come to me; others have filled in the forms."

    I said, "It is up to you. If I am to go to the army training I am going to create trouble there, because I am not a person who can obey something without sufficient reasons."

    But the society in every way teaches you to be obedient, to be humble, to be meek, to be respectful to the elders. That is not the way of spiritual growth, that is the way of committing spiritual suicide. zara209

    And you will be surprised that before deciding on my examiners, vice chancellor Doctor Tripathi, enquired of me, "Do you have any preference for whom you would like?"

    I said, "No, when you are deciding I know that you will decide on the best people. I would like the best, the topmost people. So don't think whether they will pass me or fail me, give me more marks or less marks; that is absolutely irrelevant to me. Choose the best in the whole country."

    And he chose the best. And strangely, it turned out to be very favorable. One of my professors that he chose for Indian philosophy, the best authority, was Doctor Ranade of Allahabad university. On Indian philosophy, he was the best authority. But nobody used to choose him as an examiner because he had rarely passed anybody. He would find so many faults, and he could not be challenged; he was the last person to be challenged. And almost all the professors of Indian philosophy in India were his disciples. He was the oldest man, retired. But Doctor Tripathi chose him, and asked him as a special favor, because he was old and retired by then, "You have to."

    A strange thing happened--and if you trust life, strange things go on happening. He gave me ninety-nine percent out of a hundred. He wrote a special note on the paper that he was not giving a hundred percent because that would look a little too much; that's why he had cut the one percent, "But the paper deserves one hundred percent. I am a miser," he wrote on his note.

    I read the note; Tripathi showed it to me saying, "Just look at this note: 'I am a miser, I have never gone above fifty in my whole life; the best I have given is fifty percent.'"

    But what appealed to him were my strange answers, that he had never received before. And that was his whole life's effort--that a student of philosophy should not be like a parrot, just repeating what is written in the textbook. The moment he would see that it was just a textbook thing, he was no more interested in it.

    He was a thinker and he wanted you to say something new. And with me the problem was I had no idea of the textbooks, so anything that I was writing could not be from the textbooks-- that much was certain. And he loved it for the simple reason that I am not bookish. I answered on my own.

    He appointed, for my viva voce, one Mohammedan professor of Aligarh university. He was thought to be a very strict man. And even Doctor Tripathi told me, "He is a very strict man, so be careful."

    I said to him, "I am always careful whether the man is strict or not. I don't care about the man, I simply am careful. The man is not the point: even if there is nobody in the room, I am still careful."

    He said, "I would love to be present and see it because I have heard about this man that he is really hard." So he came. That was very rare. The head of my department was there, the vice-chancellor was there, Doctor Tripathi. He asked special permission from the Mohammedan professor, Sir Saiyad, "Can I be present? I just want to see this, because you are known as the hardest examiner, and I know this boy--he is also, in his way, as hard as you are. So I want to see what happens."

    And my professor, Doctor S.K. Saxena, who loved me so much, just like a son, and cared for me in every possible way. He would even go out of his way to take care of me. For example

    every morning when the examinations were on, he would come to the university, to my hostel room, to pick me up in his car and leave me in the examination hall, because he was not certain--I may go, I may not go. So for those few days while the examinations were on. and it

    was very difficult for him to get up that early.

    He lived four, five miles away from the hostel, and he was a man who loved drinking, sleeping late. His classes never began before one o'clock in the afternoon because only by that time was he ready. But to pick me up, because the examination started at seven-thirty, at seven exactly he was in front of my room. I asked him, "Why do you waste thirty minutes?-- because from here it is just a one-minute drive to the examination hall."

    He said, "These thirty minutes are so that if you are not here then I can find where you are-- because I am not certain about you. Once you are inside the hall and the door is closed, then I take a deep breath of relief, that now you will do something, and we will see what happens."

    So Doctor Tripathi was there at the viva voce, and he was continually hitting my leg, reminding me that that man was really. So I asked Sir Saiyad, "One thing: first you prevent

    my professor, who is hitting my leg again and again, telling me not to be outrageous, not to be in any way mischievous. He told me before, 'Whenever I hit your leg, that means you are going astray, and this will be difficult.' So please stop this man first. This is a strange situation that somebody is being examined and somebody else is hitting his leg. This is inconvenient. What do you think?"

    He said, "Certainly this is inconvenient," but he laughed.

    And I said, "My vice-chancellor has told me the same: 'Be very careful.' But I can't be more careful than I am. Just start!"

    He asked me a simple question, my answer to which my professor thought mischievous. The vice-chancellor thought it mischievous, because I destroyed the whole thing.... He asked, "What is Indian philosophy?"

    I told him, "In the first place philosophy is only philosophy. It cannot be Indian, Chinese, German, Japanese--philosophy is simply philosophy. What are you asking? Philosophy is philosophizing; whether a man philosophizes in Greece or in India or in Jerusalem, what difference does it make? Geography has no impact; nor have the boundaries of a nation any impact on philosophy. So first drop that word "Indian", which is wrong. Ask me simply, 'What is philosophy?' You please drop it and ask the question again."

    The man looked at my vice-chancellor and he said, "You are right; the student is also hard! He has a point, but now it will be difficult for me to ask any questions because I know he will make a mockery of my questions." So he said, "I accept! What is philosophy?--because that question you have put yourself."

    I said to him, "It is strange that you have been a professor of philosophy for many years and you don't know what philosophy is. I really cannot believe it." And the interview was finished.

    He said to Doctor Tripathi, "Don't unnecessarily let me be harassed by this student. He will simply harass me." And to me he said, "You are passed. You needn't be worried about passing."

    I said, "I am never worried about that; about that these two persons are worried. They somehow are forcing me to pass; I am trying my best to undo what they are trying to do, but they are pushing hard."

    If you take anything as mischief, you have a certain prejudice. Once you understand that whatsoever I have done in my life...it may not be part of the formal behavior, it may not be the accepted etiquette, but then you are taking your standpoint from a certain prejudice.

    All things--and so many things have happened in such a small life that sometimes I wonder why so many things happened.

    They happened simply because I was always ready to jump into anything, never thinking twice what the consequences would be. ignor21

    I came first in the university and won the gold medal. But I had promised, so I had to drop the gold medal down the well in front of everybody; the whole university was there, and I dropped the gold medal. I said to them, "With this I drop the idea that I am the first in the university, so that nobody feels inferior to me. I am just nobody." person04

    You will not believe me, but I only remained at university because I had promised Pagal Baba to get a master's degree.

    The university gave me a scholarship for further studies, but I said no, because I had promised only up to this point.

    They said, "Are you mad? Even if you go directly into service you cannot get more money than you will get with this scholarship. And the scholarship can extend from two to as many years as your professors recommend. Don't waste the opportunity."

    I said, "Baba should have asked me to get a Ph.D. What can I do? He never asked me, and he died without knowing about it."

    My professor tried hard to persuade me, but I said to him, "Simply forget it, because I only came here to fulfill a promise given to a madman."

    Perhaps if Pagal Baba had known about the Ph.D. or D.Litt. then I would have been in a trap. But thank God he only knew about the master's degree. He thought that was the last word. I don't know whether he really wanted me to go for more scholarship. Now there is no way. One thing is certain: that if he had wanted it, I would have gone and wasted as many years as necessary. But it was not a fulfillment of my own being, nor was the master's degree. glimps34

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