The art of loving and living through the insights, words and work of a beautiful enlightened being named; Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and known simply as OSHO. The source of the posts are taken from his works that i have personally come across.
The post on this blog offers readers choices for living fully "here and now,in the present moment," challenging you to embrace a new way of experiencing loving and living that integrates body, mind and the spirit.
Satchitanand... truth, counciousness,bliss
A woman came; the woman was the queen of Ethiopia. She wanted to love Solomon, she wanted to become his beloved. She was very beautiful, but she wanted to love the wisest man in the world. So she tried a few tests on Solomon, whether he was really a wisest man in the world as he was said to be. She did many experiments; one of the experiments was this…She brought one false flower made of paper, but made so beautifully that it was almost impossible to detect that it was false. She went into the court of Solomon, she stood far away from Solomon, and she said, “I have a flower in my hand. Can you say from that far away whether it is real or unreal?”
Solomon said, “Light is not enough, and I’m an old man, and I cannot see rightly. Please open the windows.” The windows were opened. He waited for two minutes and said, “No, it’s false.”
Then the woman brought another flower from her bag and she said, “What about this?” It was exactly like the first but real.
Solomon pretended to look at it and then he said, “Yes, this is a real flower.”
The woman was astounded. The whole court was astounded:
“What has happened?” They asked him, “How could you find it?”
He said, “Easy—I opened the windows for the bees to come in. They decided. For the first flower, no bee came in; for the second they immediately rushed in.”
When you love something, you have a supra-sense about where it is. Your love monitors you, it leads you, it becomes your guide.
A bee can smell from miles far away where the flowers are. Much experiment and research has been done with bees about how they find their way. The flowers have bloomed miles away, and bees will come rushing. Almost a supra-sense exits in them; that supra sense is nothing but love.
You will find your way to the object of your love, so be very cautious about your object of love because that is going to decide your destiny. Your love is your destiny. Love something superb, love something of the supra-existence, love something of the divine, and you will find your way.
…The moment you were created, the very same moment the treasure was handed over to you – because who has ever known somebody to live without love? Have you known anybody to live without breathing? Love is the very breath of the soul.
Baul says, “as the body cannot exist without breathing, the soul cannot exist without love.” So you may know it, you may not know it, but continuously love is happening inside. It is throbbing there, it is your very beat. You just have to find a way to reach there, because you have gone out in search of the treasures that don’t belong to you, in search of other treasures that can never belong to you.
The Baul sing:
Forget not, that your body contains
the whole of existence.
I am fulfilled,
being a blow of your own breath on your flute.
What more can I wish for me
Than to be blown away with such melody?
…Whatsoever you love you become,
and whatsoever your love you will find.
So be alert about your love: Don’t love a car, don’t love a house, don’t love a bank balance – because you will become that. You ill become a dung beetle. Don’t love dung.
If you are to love, then love something…something that transcends things, something that transcends forms, something you will have to raise your eyes to the sky. Love Gourishhankar, love the Himalayan peaks. If you love something like dung, you will move into dung, because we always find a way. Whenever our love moves, we move behind it. The bee loves the lotus; it finds it. The very love is the path. Howsoever the lotus is hiding, the bee will find it.
Love has many flavors… love has many dimensions, many nuances. Love is not a single thing. It is very rich, tremendously rich. It has many aspects to it, it is multi-faceted. It is like a diamond: it has many facets and every facet gives it richness.
“Only a connoisseur” – one who has loved in many ways, one who has loved, lived courageously, dangerously, one who knows all the flavors of love…
Have you watched? – ‘love’ does not express all. It is a single word. All the ancient languages have many words for love, because there are so many loves. The English language is so poor in that way, hmm? – because you also love your car and love your woman and love your house and you love your country and you love your child and you love your mother. Only one word! You love a particular brand of cigarettes. It is very poor, because love has so many facets.
When you love a child, you love differently. It is not the same love as when you love a woman. It has no passion. It has compassion, but it has no passion. When you love your mother, it is totally different: it has reverence, it has deep gratitude. But when you love a woman it is totally different. It has great intensity, almost maddening – but it is not the way you love your mother. You love your friend: totally different. It is affection, but not in the same way
…Only a connoisseur of the flavors of love
can comprehend the language of a lover’s heart,
others have no clue.
Yes it is a language. A single word will not do, it is a complete language. And once you know, you will be simply surprised: you can touch somebody’s hand like a friend and then the touch has a different flavor. And you can touch somebody’s hand like a lover then the touch has again a different flavor.
…On the path of love, trust is the most essential thing. On the path of meditation, you can move without trust. On the path of meditation you can move without surrender, but on the path of love, without surrender, without trust, there is no go because it is the very first door. Love demand so much, it demands almost the impossible – and on the first step. Love is easy but very demanding. That’s why even though the path is easy, very few people travel it. The path of meditation is very difficult but not so demanding. That’s why the path is difficult and arduous, yet still many people travel it.
…But love? – there seems to be no way. Many people are trying to learn about love. Many people are trying pornographic literature to know about love. Many people go on reading novels and poetry and others’ love letters in order to know about love. Yes, there is a danger that you may come to know many things about love. In fact, the more you know about love, the less the possibility to know love. You will be lost in your knowledge. You will start thinking that you know.
Have you observed the fact that movie actors who are in the business of love are almost always failures in their own love lives? They never succeed. Even a Marilyn Monroe commits suicide. She was at the top; even President Kennedy was in love with her. But somehow, her whole life was empty. She committed suicide at the very peak of her career, of her fame – such a beautiful woman.
What happened? Why are actors and actresses always failures in their real love lives? They have learned so much about love that they cannot be real about love. They go acting the same roles, they go on playing the same games. As they are playing on stage, they go on playing in life. On stage it is okay because nothing is involved. But in real life, it is empty. So they go on making empty gestures.
Remember, you can know much about love, but that cannot help to know love. Love can be known only by loving. It means you have to move into love without knowing anything about it. That is why it needs courage. You have to move in the dark, with no map, nobody to guide, not even a torch. You have to move in the dark without knowing where you are moving, not knowing whether you are on the right track or not, not knowing whether you will find the path or you will fall in a ditch and be lost forever. This is courage.
The first thing is that love can be known only by loving. It is not something that can be made comprehensible by intellectual discussion about it. Love is not a theory. If you make a theory out of it, it remains incomprehensible. That is the first Baul stand point: there are things which you can know only by doing them, by being them.
...But all that is real has to be lived, and all that is existential has to be penetrated, and the risk has to be taken. one has to be courageous, one has to be daring, because when you love somebody you start losing yourself. To love somebody is to lose the ego, to love somebody is to be lost, to love somebody is to give power to somebody over you, to love somebody is to be possessed. to love somebody means surrendering...Submission is the secret of knowledge.
And what is the secret of transforming life into eternal life, time into eternity?
the secret is love. Between sex and samadhi (higher state of consciousness), the bridge is love. Love is participated in by both: on the one hand sex, on the other hand samadhi. it is the bridge. one bank is sex, on the other hand samadhi. Love includes both, comprehends both. "Through love," The Bauls say, "one reaches to the eternal home." So that is the only provision for the path: love. Love is their worship, love is their prayer, love is their meditation. the path of the Baul is the path of love. He loves tremendously.
The post will be from the spontaneous talks given by Osho in chuang tzu auditorium, Pune, India. The title is The Beloved (volume One)
The Bauls are called Bauls Because they are mad people. The word Baul comes from the Sanskrit root vatul. It means mad, affected by the wind. The Bauls belong to no religion. He is neither Hindu nor Mohammedan nor Christian nor Buddhist. He is a simple being. His rebellion is total. He does not belong to anybody; he belongs to himself.
The bee know knows it
Beloved Osho,
Only the connoisseur of the flavors of love
can comprehend the language of the lover’s heart,
others have no clue.
The taste of lime rests in the core of the fruit,
and even experts know of no easy way to reach it.
Honey is hidden in the lotus bloom
but the bee knows it.
Dung beetles nestle in dung,
Discounting honey.
…Bauls have nothing – no scriptures, not even to burn; no church, no temple, no mosque – nothing whatsoever. A Baul is always a man on the road. He has no house, no abode. God is his only abode, and the whole sky is his shelter. He possesses nothing except a poor man’s quilt, a small, handmade one-stringed instrument called ektara, and a small drum, a kettle drum. That’s all that he possesses. He prepossesses only a musical instrument and a drum. He plays with one hand on the instrument and he goes on beating the drum with the other the drum hangs by the side of his body and he dances. That is all of his religion.
Dance is his religion, singing is his worship. He does not even use the word ‘god’. The Baul word for God is adhar manush, the essential man. He worships man. He says, inside you and me, inside everybody, there is an adhar manush. The essential being is all. To find the adhar manush, the essential man, is the whole search.
So there is no God somewhere outside you, and there is no need to create any temple because you are his temple already.. the whole search is whithinwards. And o the waves of the song and on the waves of dancing, he moves withinwards. He goes on moving like a beggar, singing songs. He has nothing to preach. His whole preaching is his poetry. And his poetry is not ordinary poetry, not mere poetry. He is not consciously a poet, he sings because his heart is singing. Poetry follows him like a shadow, hence it is tremendously beautiful. He’s not calculating, he’s not making it. He lives his poetry. That is his passion and his very life. His dance is almost insane. He has never been trained to dance, he does not know anything about the art of dancing. He dances like a mad man, like a whirlwind, and he lives very spontaneously, because the Baul says, “if you want to reach to the adhar manush, the essential man, then the ways, the ways goes trhough the sahaj manush, spontaneous man.”
To reach the essential man, you have to go through the essential man. Spontaneity is the only way to reach to the essence…so he cries when he feels like crying. You can find him standing in a village street crying, for nothing. If you ask, “Why are you crying?” he will laugh. He will say, “There is no why. I felt like…I felt like crying, so I cried.” If he feels like laughing, he laughs; if he feels like singing, he sings – but everything has to come out of deep feeling. He’s not mind oriented, not in any way controlled and disciplined. He knows no rituals. He’s absolutely against rituals because he says, “A ritualized person is a dead person. He cannot be spontaneous.” And a person who follows rituals and formalities too much creates so many habits around him that there is no need to be alert. Alertness is lost, habits are formed. Then the man of rituals lives through habits. If he goes to the temple he bows down, not in anyway conscious and alert of what he is doing, but just because he has been taught to do so, he has learned to do so. It has become a conditioning.
So they don’t follow any ritual, they don’t have any technique, they don’t have any habit. So you cannot find two Bauls that are similar, they are individuals. Their rebellion leads them to become authentic individuals.
This has to be understood: the more you become part of the society, the less and less you become an individual, the less and less you are spontaneous – because the very membership of the society will not allow you to be spontaneous. You have to follow the rules of the game. If you enter a society, you accept to follow those rules that society is playing or has decided to play. That’s what membership means: you enter into a certain organization. You have to play the game. Bauls have no organization, so each baul is individual.
And that’s and religion really is: it is an individual approach towards truth. One has to go alone, one has to go in his own way; one has to find one’s own way. You cannot follow another, you cannot move on a ready-made track. The more you search your own way, the closer you will be to God, or to truth, or to reality. In fact, the way is created by walking, you create it as you walk. It is not ready there for you, waiting to be walked on. You walk and you create it.
Can’t you see any beauty in sadness? Meditate over it. Next time, when you are sad don’t fight it. Don’t waste time in fighting – accept it, let it be a welcome guest, look deep into it with love, care… be a real host! And you will be surprised – you will be surprised beyond your comprehension – sadness has a few beauties that happiness can never have. Sadness has depth, and happiness is shallow. Sadness has tears, and tears go deeper than any laughter can ever go. Sadness has a silence of its own, a melody, which happiness can never have. Happiness will have its own song but more noisy, not silent.
I am not saying to choose sadness. I am just saying, enjoy it too. When you are happy, enjoy happiness. Swim on the surface, and sometimes dive deep into the river. It is the same river! On the surface is the play of ripples and waves, and th un rays and the wind – it has its own beauty. Diving deep into the river has its own quality, its own adventure, its own dangers.
And don’t become attached to anything. There are people who have become attached to sadness, too – psychologists know about this, they are called masochists. They go on creating situations in which they can remain miserable forever. Misery is the only thing they enjoy, they are afraid of happiness. In misery they are at home. Many masochist becomes religious, because religion provides a great protection for the masochists mind. Religion gives a beautiful realization for being a masochist.
Just being a masochist without being religious, you will feel condemned and you will feel ill, ill at ease, and you will know that you are abnormal. You will feel guilty about what you are doing to your life, and will try to hide it. But if a masochist becomes religious he can exhibit his masochism with great pride, because now it is no longer masochism – it is asceticism, it is austerity. It is “self-discipline” not torture. Only the labels have been changed – now nobody can cal the person abnormal, he is a saint! Nobody can call him pathological; he is pious, holy. Masochist have always moved towards religion, it has great attraction for them. In fact, so many masochists down the ages have moved toward religion – and it was natural, that movement – that ultimately religion grew to be dominated by masochists. That’s why so much of religion insists on being life negative, life3 destructive. It is not for life, it is not for love, it is not for joy – it goes on insisting that life is a misery. By saying that life is a misery, it rationalizes its own clinging to misery.
I have heard a beautiful story – I don’t know how far it is correct, I cannot vouch for it.
Confucius closes his eyes halfway – he is a middlist, he used to preach the golden mean – and ask the waiter to give him the glass. He would like to have a sip – but just a sip, because without tasting how can one say whether life is a misery or not? Confucius had a scientific mind; he was not a mystic, he had a very pragmatic, earth bound mind. He was the first behaviorist. The world has known, very logical. And it seems perfectly right – he says, “First I will have a sip then I will say what I think.” He takes a sip and he says, “Buddha is right – life is a misery.”
Lao Tzu takes al the three glasses and he says, “Unless one drinks totally, how can one say anything?” He drinks all the three glasses and starts dancing!
Buddha and Confucius asked him “Are you not going to say anything?” And Lao Tzu says, “This is what I am saying – my dance and my song are speaking for me.” Unless you taste totally, you cannot say. And when you taste totally, you still cannot say because what you know is such that no words are adequate.
Buddha is on one extreme, Confucius is in the middle. Lao Tzu has drunk all the three glasses – the one that was brought for Buddha, the one that was brought for Confucius and the one that was brought for him. He has drank them all; he has lived life in its three dimensionality.
My Own approach is that of Lao Tzu. Live life in all possible ways; don’t choose one thing against the other, and don’t try to be in the middle. Don’t try to balance yourself – balance is not something that can be cultivated. Balance is something that comes out of experiencing all the dimensions of life. Balancing is something that happens; it is not something that can be brought about through your efforts. If you bring it through your efforts it will be false, forced. And you will remain tense, you will not be relaxed, because how can a person who is trying to remain balanced in the middle be relaxed? You will always be afraid that if you relax you may start moving to the left and to the right. You are bound to remain uptight, and to be uptight is to miss the whole opportunity, the whole gift of life.
Don’t be uptight. Don’t live life according to principles. Live life in its totality, drink life in its totality! Yes, sometimes it taste bitter – so what? That taste of bitterness will make you capable of tasting sweetness. You will be able to appreciate the sweetness only if you have tasted its bitterness. One who knows not how to cry will not know how to laugh, either. One who cannot enjoy a deep laughter, a belly laugh, that person’s tears will be crocodile tears. They cannot be true, they cannot be authentic.
I Don’t teach the middle way. I teach the total way. Then balance comes of its own accord, and then balance has tremendous beauty and grace. You have not forced it, it simply come. By moving gracefully to the left, to the right, to the middle, slowly a balance comes to you because you remain so unidentified. When sadness comes, you know it will pass, too. Nothing remains; everything passes by. The only thing that is always abides is your witnessing. The witnessing brings balance. That witnessing is balance.
Why subtle? – because one has to be sensitive, one has to be more and more in the heart, one has to become capable of feeling and response. Feel, cry, laugh, dance, weep, shout, but do it from the heart. and by and by you will feel a new change, a transformation – energy falling from the head towards the heart. and you will start moving in a totally different way. New values will arise, because the head has different values.
You fall in love with a beautiful woman, but the head says, “what are you doing? This woman is beautiful but she has no money.” The head says, “Better find a girl who has money.” The head is calculating, the heart is mad. Hence I say to you, if you want to love, be mad. Only mad people – mad in the sense that they are not calculating, mad in the sense that they can risk tomorrow for today – only mad people can move on the path of love.
The flute of the infinite is played without ceasing,
and its sound is love:
When love renounces all limits,
it reaches truth.
How widely the fragrance spreads!
It has no end, nothing stand in its way.
The form of this melody is bright
Like a million suns:
Incomparably sounds the veena.
the veena of the notes of truth.
Subtle is the path of Love!
Therein there is no asking and no not asking,
there one looses one’s self at this feet,
there one is immersed in the joy of the seeking:
plunged in the deeps of love
as the fish in the water.
The lover is never slow in offering his head
for his lords service.
Kabir declares the secret of this love.
…Lovers penetrate into each other. It is not only a sexual metaphor; the penetration is spiritual, the sexual is only a shadow of it.
Lovers penetrate into each other. Their boundaries are blurred, they become nebulous, their definition becomes shaky. When living with a woman or with a man for many years, and suddenly the woman dies or the man dies, the pain that is felt, the suffering, the agony that is felt by the partner who is left behind is not only because somebody has died. It is because now he will never be whole. It is because now part of his being is destroyed completely, utterly. Now there will exist a black hole in his being, an abyss, an emptiness. When a lover dies, something deep inside you dies too. You had become so together; your life was no longer separate, it was overlapping. You were in two bodies, but you had become one soul – that is the meaning of love.
When the same happens to the whole of existence – that you start feeling that you are not separate, your boundaries overlap; not only do your boundaries overlap, your centers overlap; the world is your center too – in that ecstasy of oness is the fragrance called love.
… We can forget the word God, but we should not forget the word love. Love is far more valuable than the word God, because love is the very spirit of God. God may be just the body, love is the very soul.
When love renounces all limits… there are many limits, and our love is confined in limits. That’s why even if we love, we are never happy with it. The unhappiness that comes through love is not because love, but because of the limitations that surrounds it.
…People escape to the Himalayas: they are escaping from love, not from the world. They are afraid of love, and their fear has some reason behind it. Whenever you are in love, you are in a turmoil. Whenever there is love there is difficulty; whenever there is love there is conflict; whenever there is love there is hell. Says Jean-Paul Sartre, “The other is hell.” So whenever there is love the other enter your life, and suddenly there is conflict, collision, struggle to dominate each other, to posses each other, to master each, and other and the misery arises. Lovers are rarely happy. I am not saying that non-lovers are happy; non-lovers may not be happy, but they are never so unhappy as the lovers.
And lovers are more unhappy, because love had promised so much in the beginning – great expectation had arisen, great hope was there – and then everything is shattered on the rocks. A non-lover had no expectations; he was settled, he was not hoping for heaven: you cannot throw a man into hell if he is not hoping for heaven: you can only throw a man into hell only when he hopes for heaven; otherwise there is no possibility.
…When two people find themselves bound together, by and by they become acquainted with each other, and by and by they start liking each other. By and by they adjust. It is very mundane, it has no poetry in it.
In the West marriage is not a bed of roses. The boat is always rocking; it is always on the rocks, it is always is a state of collapse at any moment. Why? If you love, you expect. When you expect, love becomes contaminated, polluted. Then love is not really love; it now has limitation – because of the expectation. When you love a person you start possessing the person: you are afraid your woman may move to somebody else. You become so much afraid that you cannot even tolerate her looking at somebody. You cannot tolerate the idea that she was laughing with somebody else. That she can laugh without you? …it is impossible, it hurts. You start creating a prison for her – a beautiful cage, of course that you call home, but you create a cage. Certainly, when you start creating a cage, she has to create a cage for you too – because nobody can become the jailer unless he becomes a prisoner too. When you possess somebody, you are possessed. When you force somebody to be a slave, you have become a slave in the process itself.
…Never try to use anybody; share but never use. Respect the dignity of the other, never interfere, and then love has a bigger space, less limited. But still, it will be limited.
…Love is something bigger than you, you cannot control it. If you want to control, you can remain in hate. Hate can be controlled, hate is smaller than you. Love cannot be controlled, love is bigger than you. If you try to control love you will miss all possibilities. You will become a loveless being – and that’s what a dead person is: a loveless being who exist in the head and who has forgotten his own heart.
Kabir says: Bhakti ka marag jhina re – subtle is the path of love. Yes, it is not gross. The head is nothing but logic, arithmetic, calculations, cunningness, cleverness; good to exploit people, good to collect money, have a big bank balance; good to become a politician, good to overpower people, good to destroy. The head is very gross.
…Love concrete human beings, love concrete trees, love concretes rock, particulars. And only then will you know what love is. Forget great abstractions, they are dangerous. Man has been fighting because of them, destroying each other. A Mohammedan is ready to fight for Islam, and he will kill human beings for the love of Islam. Now this is foolish. The Christian is even ready to kill Christians if it is to save Christianity. What is this Christianity?
Love the concrete, love the immediate. Enjoy this moment, don’t prepare for tomorrow. Today is beautiful – delight in it, let it be a celebration.
…And one who knows life knows that death is another birth and nothing else. Death is another birth; a new door opens. Death is the other side of the same door you call birth: from one side the door is known death, from the other side the door is known as birth. Death brings another birth, another beginning another journey.
…Never be anywhere halfheartedly. Either be or don’t be, but never be half hearted; otherwise you are committing a wrong against yourself.
Through the mind you have come across your own projections. Through the mind you never come to the real. The mind goes on creating ideas about the real. You never face reality as it is; there is always a screen of thought, and the thought goes on distorting the reality. You never see that which is, you are not objective. Your imagination goes on working, your wish-fulfillment goes on working. Your desire go on coloring things. You can never see things as they are unless the mind is completely put aside. When you see through the heart, you see reality.
Very difficult to understand, the very extreme of illogic. We can understand love. But then what about renunciation? We can understand renunciation, but what about love? They seem to be the greatest contradiction possible. When you love how can you renounce? And when you renounce how can you love?
Try to understand it. Ordinary love is sort of sleep: you become attached to the object of love, you start feeling jealous, you become possessive – and your possessiveness and jealousy really poison the whole love. They destroy it. Love is destroyed by jealousy, possessiveness. The moment you try to possess your love object, you have denied love; you have already denied. You have declared that you don’t love.
Love is possible only if there is no possessiveness and no jealousy. That means love has attained renunciation. You love the person but you renounce the possessiveness; you love the person but you renounce jealousy; you love the person but you don’t want to make a slave out of him or her; you love the person but you respect his or her freedom; you love the person but your love does not become an imprisonment. You love, yet you remain unattached. You love, you love tremendously, but still you don’t cling: that is renunciation.
Love the world, and don’t be attached. Be in the world, but don’t be of the world – that is what renunciation is. That is what I call sannyas: a great harmony between love and renunciation; a great harmony between this world and that; an great harmony between God the creator and the world, the created; a great harmony between the body and the soul; a great harmony, with no conflict – the disappearance of all conflict.
If your love is so great that it contain renunciation, only then is it love. If your renunciation is so great that it can contain love, only then is it renunciation. A man who can be loving and yet in renunciation is the greatest growth, the destiny. That is the destiny we are seeking. And unless it is attained. You will never feel fulfilled. God is the lover and the sannyasin.
Look: he loves the world, and yet you cannot find him anywhere but he loves the world, and yet you cannot find him anywhere. He is completely absent; his renunciation is utter. He loves the world – he goes on creating it. He loves tremendously, otherwise why should he create? He cares tremendously, but is so unattached that h never comes in the market place to declare, “Look, I am the creator.”
He has no “I.” he is the creator without ever feeling, “I am the creator.” His renunciation is utter, his love is utter.
A sannyasin will be a miniature of God: his love will be total, his renunciation too. And Kabir says:
He has found both love and renunciation
Never descend to death.
He goes beyond death; he becomes deathless. He has attained to the nectar of the divine. He has attained to the elixir. For this elixir, the alchemist all over the world have been searching and searching. This elixir can happen to you. Just one combination is needed, one great synthesis: the synthesis between love and renunciation.
…Kabir does not believe in effort, he believe in effortlessness. That’s what he calls sahaj samadhi, spontaneous ecstasy. Kabir is a lover; his path is the path of love. Love knows no effort.
Have you observed it in your own life? Can you do anything about love? If I say to you, “Go and love that man,” what will you do? You will say, “What nonsense! How can I go and love like that?” you cannot command anybody to go and love somebody. If love happens, it happens; if it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. There is no way to produce it in order. And that is one of the miseries of the world; we have all learned to produce it on order. So of course it is false.
…Real love is greater than you; it is huge, enormous. It simply overfloods you, you are simply taken away. You are no longer standing anywhere. You lose your being in real love; it is great, it pours from the heaven.
After the thirty fifth year, one has to learn how to learn relaxing and dropping the ego and becoming more and more surrendered to the divine. The West the first part of life; the East the second part of life. Life should start Western and should end Eastern. One should first go into the world; in the world, will be the need. One should go and fight and struggle, because struggle gives you a sharp intelligence, but one should not continue fighting to the very end. Then what is the point?
Fight, fight sharpens your intelligence, know the ways of the world, wander all over the world, be a conqueror, and then… Then move inwards. Now you have to know the outside; now try to know the inner.
…Tantra is the oldest science to help you to come to an inner harmony, an inner wedding, an inner orgasm. Your woman and man meet inside and give birth to the child, the child Christ. Then you become a trinity: the father, the mother, the child. And when you are a trinity, you are blessed, you have come home. You know what life is, you have achieved the goal.
…every individual has a particular weakness, and the weakness persist because you remain unaware of it.
…reality cannot be denied for long. That’s why your so called great people, or so called great saints, don’t live in the marketplace, they go to the Himalayas. If they lived in the market place it would be impossible; sooner or later the reality would assert. Reality cannot be defeated forever. You can create fiction for a few days, a few moments, but you cannot live in fiction forever, that is not possible. The fiction is bound to collide with realty and will collapse.
…And always remember this: I am never totally against anything, and I am never totally in favor of anything. I always keep a balance.
The orange robe, the mala, the locket… innocent ritual, but it adds spice. It gives you a feeling of community. And a man needs a few fictions to live. The truth is too hard. Yes, one day you will become able to live with truth, but right now, no. You have to pass through many stages. Only in the ultimate jump can you drop all fictions. Then too you may not drop them, because they are beautiful in themselves.
…I have lived with money, I have lived without money, and I have one confession to make: it is always better to live with money than without. Money is useful. One should not be used buy it, that’s all. I’m not against money; it should be used – it is a good, utilitarian invention. It helps. It is tremendously useful; but use it, don’t be used by it.
…This is my whole teaching: not to carry the past and just remain true to the moment. Then there will be no contradictions. There is none—the contradictions appear only because you are trained too logically, an I am an illogical person. My whole logic is that of illogic. I am an irrationalist.
…When you are seeking in the scriptures you are seeking theories and not truth – and truth is original, has to be original. The truth has to be born in you, it cannot be borrowed.
…Sometimes look into somebody’s eyes and don’t call them any names – man, woman, yours, friend, enemy, young, old, beautiful, ugly – don’t bring names in. just look into the eyes, try to avoid verbalization, and suddenly you will come to a leap, a quantum leap, where you will be surprised to see that the observer has become the observed, that the observed becomes observer. Then you don’t know who is “I” and who is “thou.” These are moments from where God enters you; his first foot step are heard.
At least for one hour, drop out of language. And to drop out of language is to drop out of society; to drop out of language is to drop out of religion; to drop out of language is to drop out of all that is man-created. Have you seen? – language is very, very significant. Animals are silent, trees are silent; they don’t argue, they don’t have any scriptures. A tree is neither Christian nor a Hindu nor a Mohammedan; it is simply there in its beauty, with no name. It does not know even its own name; those names are given by human beings. Your society is created through language, your knowledge is created through language. Just think, if suddenly a miracle happened and language disappeared from the world, what would be the difference between man and animal? What would be the difference between a Hindu and a Mohammedan? There would be no difference. All distinctions are language created.
… If you fight with a word you will need another word to fight it with, remember. You cannot fight a word without words.
…You can fight only with words. To fight with words you will need more words, and you will get into the whole rut again. No, need; let the words pass, let them float, it’s ok. You be indifferent, you be neutral. They will buzz around for a few days, and then by and by they will feel they are neglected; by and by they will feel you are no longer interested; by and by they will feel they are not welcome. And when words start feeling they are not welcome, they start disappearing. You are no longer host to them.
…you have to drop language before God can speak his language. You have to be utterly silent before he can convey his message.
But we have a very wrong notion: we think if we have to pray, we have to talk to God. No, prayerfulness is ore listening than talking; better listen than talk. You cannot improve upon God. Whatsoever you say is meaningless, whatsoever you say is ridiculous. He knows it already. So what is the point? Keep quiet, remain in silence. Rather, try to hear. Be sensitive; don’t use the tongue. The prayer that comes out of the tongue is foolish, meaningless. You are advising God: you are saying, “Do it this way. Whatsoever you are doing is going wrong.” You say, “My wife is ill; make her well again. And I am getting old; give me more strength and a longer life” – and so on and so forth. All your prayers are your advice to God about how things should be.
…Jus the other day somebody asked, “what is the meaning of surrender”? This is the meaning of surrender: drop your otherness. Don’t think of yourself as the other, put aside your separateness. Don’t say, “I am”; let him be, and let him be so totally that you are drowned in that totality, absorbed, lost. Be a wave in the ocean, but don’t claim you are separate from the ocean – that I the meaning of surrender.
…there can be no cause to God, God is the ultimate cause. That is what we mean by “God’: the ultimate cause, the uncaused, which has always been, which will always be. There is none before it and none after it. God has no past and no future, God has only the present. God is eternal.
