Love and the Dancing Bauls

OSHO : The Beloved, Volume 1, Chapter 1 The first question:OSHO, Only a connoisseur of the flavors of love can comprehend  the language of a 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 within the lotus bloom -- but the bee knows it. Dung beetles nestle in dung, discounting honey. Submission is the secret of knowledge. I'm tremendously happy to introduce you to the world of the Bauls. I hope you will be nourished by it, enriched by it. It is a very bizarre world, eccentric, insane. It has to be so. It is unfortunate but it has to be so, because the world of the so-called sane people is so insane that if you really want to be sane in it you will have to be insane. You will have to choose a path of your own. It is going to be diametrically opposite to the ordinary path of the world. The Bauls are called Bauls because they are mad people. The word "Baul" comes from the Sanskrit rootvatul. It means: mad, affected by wind. The Baul belongs to no religion. He is neither Hindu nor Mohammedan  nor Christian nor Buddhist. He is a simple human being. His rebellion is total. He does not belong to anybody; he only belongs to himself. He lives in a no man's land: no country is his, no religion is his, no scripture is his. His rebellion goes even deeper than the rebellion of the Zen Masters -- because at least formally, they belong to Buddhism; at least formally, they worship Buddha. Formally they have scriptures -- scriptures denouncing scriptures, of course -- but still they have. At least they have a few scriptures to burn. Bauls have nothing -- no scripture, not even to burn; no church, no temple, no mosque -- nothing whatsoever. A Baul is a man always 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, hand-made one-stringed instrument called aektara, and a small drum, a kettle-drum. That's all that he possesses. He possesses 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 isadhar manush, the essential man. He worships man. He says, inside you and me, inside everybody, there is an essential being. That essential being is all. To find that adhar manush, that 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 withinwards. And on the waves of 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 also 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 is not calculating it, he is not making it. He lives his poetry. That's 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 madman, 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 way, the way goes through sahaja manush, the spontaneous man. To reach to the essential man, you have to go through the spontaneous 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 is not mind oriented, not in any way controlled and disciplined. He knows no rituals. He is absolutely against rituals because he says: "A ritualized person is a dead person." He cannot be spontaneous. And a person who follows rituals, 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 any way 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 a part of society, the less and less you are an individual, the less and less you are spontaneous -- because the very membership in the society will not allow you to be spontaneous.  You will have to follow the rules of the game. If you enter a society, you accept to follow those rules that the 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 what 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. It is as if you are lost in a forest. What do you do? You have no map and there is no way leading anywhere -- trees and trees and trees all around, and you are lost. What do you do? You start walking, searching, seeking. By your very walk, by your very search, a path is created. Life is wild, and it is good that it is wild. It is good that it has no map, that it is not charted, that it is still unknown. And its unknowability  is such that there is no way to make it known. Otherwise, all charm will be lost, all beauty will be lost. Then life will not surprise you; and if surprise is lost, all is lost.  Then there will be no wonder, no wondering. Then your eyes will go dead and your heart will stop beating; the passion will disappear. Love will not be possible. Awe, wonder, surprise: these are the ingredients of the charisma, of the mystery of life. So it is good that there are no scriptures; it is good that there are no ritualized religions; it is good that you are not on a super-highway. The Baul is a rebellious person, and I say "rebellious" with great consideration. He is not a revolutionary. A revolutionary is still thinking in terms of the society. How to change the society: that is the revolutionary's continuous brooding. But he remains society-focused, society-oriented: "How to change the world?" A rebellious person does not bother about the world because he understands that the world cannot be changed by him, and who is he to change the world? --  "What is my authority to change the world? And if the world decides to be the way it is, who am I to interfere with it?" He leaves the world to itself. He does not interfere, he does not meddle with it. He starts changing himself. His revolution is inward; his revolution is absolutely inner. A rebellious person is a drop-out. He simply drops out of that society which doesn't suit him.  He does not wait for it to be transformed so that he can fit with it. That desire is foolish, stupid. Then you will be lost. And that day,  that utopia will never happen -- when the society has changed so much that you can fit with it, and the society can fit with you. It has never happened. Revolutionaries have lived down through the centuries, and died. The world has remained the same, more or less, but the lives of those revolutionaries were wasted in changing it. Just think of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, coming back and looking at the world -- they will start crying. This is the world for which they wasted their whole lives? This is the world for which they hoped and staked their whole lives, gambled with their lives?  They could not live their lives because they were trying to change the world. They were trying to change the world because they thought that only when the world had changed according to their wishes would they be able to live. Otherwise, how could they live? How can you live happily in an unhappy world? -- that is the revolutionary's question. Very significant:  "How can you be happy in an unhappy world?" -- So he tries to make the world happy. The rebellious person says: "Leave the world to itself. Nobody has ever changed it." He is more practical and down to earth: "I can live my own way. I can create my own world within me." He is a drop-out. Bauls are drop-outs. They don't belong to any religion, to any society, to any nation. They are beggars, wanderers, vagabonds, hippies, gypsies, moving from one village to another, singing their song, dancing their dance, living their lives in their own way, doing their thing. A rebellious person is one who says: "I'm not going to wait, I'm going to live right now." The revolutionary hopes for the future. He says: "I am going to wait. I will wait for the right moment." The rebellious person says: "The right moment is here-now, and I'm not going to wait for anybody, I'm going to live right now." A rebellious person lives in the present. And one thing more to be understood: a rebellious person is not against anybody. He may appear against because he is trying to live his own life, but he is not really against anybody. He may not go to the mosque but he is not against Mohammedans. He may not go to the temple but he is not against Hindus. He simply says: "I am not concerned; it is irrelevant." He simply says: "Please leave me alone. You do your thing and let me do my thing. Don't interfere with me and I will not interfere with you." The vision of the rebellious mind is very realistic. Life is short. Nobody knows whether tomorrow will come or not. The future is not certain, and this is the only moment one can live. Why waste it in fighting with others? Why waste it in trying to convince others? Enjoy it, delight in it. A Baul is a hedonist; he is epicurean. He starts living: he loves, he lives, he delights. When a Baul dies, he is not afraid of death -- he is ready. He has lived his life. He is ripe. The fruit is ripe and ready to fall to the ground, with no hesitation. You will be afraid. You are already afraid of death because you have not been able to live. You have not lived yet and death has come or is coming. You have not yet had time to live and death has knocked at the door. How can you accept death? How can you welcome? A Baul is ready to die any moment because he has not wasted a single moment of life. He has lived it as deeply as it was possible to live. He has no complaint, he has no grudge against life, and he has nothing to wait for. So if death comes, he is ready to live death also. He embraces death. He says: "Come in." He becomes a host to death also. If you live rightly, you will be ready to die peacefully, blissfully. If you are not living rightly, if you are postponing, if you are simply putting aside your life and doing other things rather than enjoying life, doing a thousand and one things rather than delighting in life, then of course, naturally, you will be afraid of death. And when death comes, you will be a coward in front of death. A Baul dies dancing, a Baul dies singing, a Baul dies playing his aektara and his duggi. He knows how to live and how to die. And he is not worried about God; he is only worried about the adhar manush, the essential man that resides in him. His whole search is to find this essential man that he is. "Who am I?" is his essential search. And he is very respectful about other human beings because they all belong to that essential nature. All other forms are of that formless essential nature; all the waves belong to the ocean. He is very respectful, tremendously respectful. A Baul never condemns anything. To me, that is the very criterion of a religious man: he has no condemnatory attitude. He accepts everything, his world includes everything. It does not exclude anything. Sex is accepted,samadhi also.  His world is very rich because nothing is excluded from it. He says: "Everything comes from that essential core of your being, so why deny it? And if you deny it, how will you be able to reach to the source?" Wherever you deny something, you cling there, you stop there. Then the journey cannot move to the very core. Life, as it is, is totally accepted. That does not mean that a Baul is a man of mere indulgence, no. He knows the alchemy of how to transform the baser into the higher. He knows how to transform iron into gold. He knows how to transform sex into samadhi; he knows the secret. And what is the secret of transforming life into eternal life, time into eternity? The secret is love. Between sex and samadhi, 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, the other bank is 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. There are two traditions in India: one is the tradition of the Vedas, the other is the tradition of the Tantras.Vedas are more formal, more of the nature of rituals. Vedas are more social, organizational. Tantras are more individual -- less concerned with rituals, forms, habits, more concerned with the essential; less concerned with the forms, more concerned with the soul. Vedas are not all-inclusive. Much is excluded; it is more puritan, more moralistic. Tantras are non-puritan, all-inclusive, more human, more earthly. Tantras say that everything has to be used and nothing is to be denied. Bauls belong more to the Tantras than to the Vedas. There is only one improvement on Tantras;  that is the only difference. Tantra is all-inclusive, more feminine than male. The Vedas are more male-oriented,  theTantras are more feminine. Of course, woman is more inclusive than man. Man is included in woman, but woman is not included in man. Man seems to be a sort of specialization. Woman seems to be more general, more fluid, more round. Tantra is the way of the feminine, just like Tao. But the Bauls have improved upon Tantra also. Tantra is too technical. The very word "Tantra" means technique. It is a little harsh, more scientific. Bauls are more poetic; Bauls are more soft -- singers and dancers. Tantra uses sex to rise higher than it, but it uses it. Sex becomes instrumental. Bauls say that is not very respectful: "How can you use some energy? How can you use some energy as a means?" They don't use sex as a means; they delight in it, they enjoy it. They make a worship out of it, but without any technique. It is not technological. They love it, and through love the transformation happens on its own accord. In Tantra, you are to remain unattached. Even while using sex as a means to go towards samadhi, you have to remain unattached to sex, absolutely neutral, absolutely like an observer, a witness, just like a  scientist working in his lab. In fact, Tantras say that Tantra techniques cannot be used with the woman you love,  because love will be a disturbance. You will be too attached. You will not be able to remain detached and outside it.  So Tantrics will find women with whom they are not in love at all so the attitude can remain absolutely of the observer. That's where Bauls differ. They say it is too cruel; this passionless attitude is too cruel. There is no need to be so hard and so harsh. Through love, the transformation is possible. That's why I call their attitude more poetic,  more human, and more worthy. The Bauls say you can live attached in the world and yet be unattached; you can love  a woman and yet be a witness; you can be in the marketplace and yet be beyond it. You can live in the world and be not of it. This vision is my vision also. That is the meaning of my sannyas: be in the world but don't be of it. And, nothing is of  worth if it is not done through love. That's where Tantra lacks something; it lacks humanity. If you love a woman, Tantra is not possible. If you love a man, Tantra is not possible. You should be completely aloof. Then sex becomes very scientific. It becomes a technique, something to be manipulated, something to be done -- not something to be in,  not something that absorbs you, not something oceanic, orgasmic, but something that you are doing. The very idea of doing something to a man or to a woman because you want to achieve samadhi, the very idea of using the other as an instrument, as a means, is ugly and immoral. That's where Bauls have a totally different fragrance. They say: "There is no need to be so hard. There is no need to be so means-oriented. Love will do." And we will try to understand what they mean by love. The first poem.... These poems belong to different Bauls, but I'm not going to use their names. That is irrelevant. They all belong to the same vision. Different poems, but they remain, deep down, as the same poem; different words, different forms, but running through them is the same current. It is just like in a garland, many flowers are held together,  but only one thread runs inside and holds them all. We will insist on that thread. We will not be bothered about  who has written this poem. In fact, many of the poems are anonymous. Nobody has ever known who wrote them, because in fact, they were never written. Bauls are illiterate; maybe that's why they have such purity. They are not very cultured people, educated in the ways  of the world. Maybe that's why there is such innocence. They are children of the earth: uneducated, poor, humble, but very sincere. So, I will not be telling you who has sung this song, or the other songs that will follow in the coming  twenty days. That is irrelevant. They come out of the same vision. They have a certain melody, so individual that it is called Baulsur, the melody of the Baul; so special, the taste is so special and the fragrance is so individual that whenever you hear a song from the Bauls, you will immediately recognize it. It has its own individuality, its own style: wild, illiterate, uncultured,  but very individualistic. Just as the ocean tastes the same -- from anywhere you taste it, and it is salty -- in these songs, immediately you will feel that they come from one vision, one attitude, one passion, one experience. And they were never written. Bauls have been singing them down through the centuries. Each Baul has dropped something, added something, made his own songs or used the old songs that he had heard from  his Masters, but the vision is so clear that you can never miss when you hear a Baul song. The first song: Only a connoisseur of the flavors of love can comprehend the language of a 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 within the lotus bloom -- but the bee knows it. Dung beetles nestle in dung, discounting honey. Submission is the secret of knowledge. 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 try to make a theory out of it, it remains incomprehensible. That is the first Baul standpoint: there are things which you can know only by doing them, by being them. If you don't know swimming you don't know what it is, and there is no way to know about it. You may go and hear a thousand and one swimmers talking about it, but still you will never know it, what it is. It is incomprehensible in every other way; you will have to learn swimming. You will have to go down to the river; you will have to take the risk, the danger of being drowned. If you are very, very clever, you may say: "I will not step into the river unless I know swimming first." It is logical: "How can I step into the river when I don't know swimming? So, first I must know swimming; only then can I step into the river." But then you will never be able to know swimming, because even to learn  swimming, you will have to step into the river. Swimming is known only by swimming; love is known only by loving; prayer is known only by praying. There is no other way. There are things which can be known without moving into them -- those are the futile things,  those are intellectual things: philosophies, dogmas, creeds. 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. And it is a great 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... ...because to the Baul, love is the only knowledge there is. You can read the Vedas: there is no need to submit,  there is no need to surrender. You can read the Bible; there is no need to surrender. You can become very proficient, very skilled, very learned, but there is no need to surrender. If there is no need to surrender,  it is not knowledge for the Baul. The Baul criterion is this: that when something demands surrender, only then is there a possibility of real knowledge, otherwise not. If you come to me and I just impart knowledge to you.... Many people come to me and they say: "Is there any difficulty if we don't become sannyasins, if we are not  surrendered to you? And still, we love what you say. Still we want to listen to it. Is there any problem? Can't we do that?" I say: "You can do that; the problem is not there. But then you will collect only the superficial. You will collect the words. Then you will collect only the fallen dregs from the table. You will not really be a guest to me. You will miss all that is essential; only the non-essential will be your fate. You have to decide." Once you are surrendered, a totally different world opens between me and you. The heart-to-heart communication starts. Then you can listen to my words, but you listen in such a different way, with such deep sympathy and love, with such gratitude and receptivity, that those words are no longer words; they start becoming alive. You have made them alive with your receptivity. You become pregnant with what I am saying to you, with what I am communicating to you. Then, there happens a transfer; then words are just excuses. Hanging around the word, I send you something which cannot be managed in the word. Then not only is the word reaching you, but the climate that it carries through my heart. If you are in love with me, then there is a totally different kind of understanding between me and you. If you are not in love with me, then we are far apart. Then you are on some other planet, thousands and thousands of miles away from me. I may shout: you may hear a few words, but nothing special is going to happen that way. You may become more knowledgeable, but that is not the point. You should have more being, not more knowledge. If you are really becoming richer here, in close contact with me, then your being is growing. Then you are becoming more and more crystallized, more and more authentic, more and more alive, more and more divine. That is not possible without love. And what is surrender? Surrender means surrendering the ego, surrender means surrendering all that you know. Surrender means surrendering your knowledge, your mind, your intellect. Surrender is a suicide, a suicide of the past. If you carry your past within you in a secret way, then your gesture of sannyas is impotent. You can take sannyas and still go on carrying your past, hiding and guarding it like a treasure. Then just on the surface you will be a sannyasin, but not surrendered to me. And then if you are not fulfilled, nobody else is responsible but you. The first Baul standpoint is that existential things can be known only through existential ways. Love can be known only by loving. Somebody asked Jesus: "How to pray?" and he said, "Pray." But he said: "That's what I am asking. I don't know how to pray." So Jesus said: "I will pray. You sit by my side and you also try." How to teach prayer? It can be caught but it cannot be taught. If you are open to me, you can catch many things. If you are not open to me, nothing can be taught. A prayer is like an infection. Love is also like an infection: it can be caught but not taught. You can catch it. It is flowing all around you, but if you remain like an island, closed, then there is no way to teach it to you. The Bauls say: God is deserting your temple as you amuse yourself by blowing conch shells and ringing bells. The road to you is blocked by temples and mosques. I hear you call, my lord, but I cannot advance. Masters and teachers bar the way. God is all around you, but you are so full of scriptures, knowledge, so full of your own ego that there is no space left inside you where God can penetrate and enter into you. It has become impossible. It is becoming impossible only because of you. Jesus is right when he says: "Pray, if you want to know what prayer is"; and the man is also right. He says: "How to pray? That is my problem. You have not answered it." And Jesus says: "The only way is, I will pray. I will kneel down in prayer. You just sit by my side, open, vulnerable; you may catch it." That's what I'm trying to do here. Just be open to me; you may catch it. There is every possibility once you are not barring your own path, once you start getting out of your own way. There is no problem -- because the essential man that is speaking to you is also hearing through you. Then the essential can meet with the essential. The adhar manush can meet with the adhar manush. Just put your ego aside, because that is the non-essential. Face me with your essence, encounter me with your essence. Then suddenly you will see a new fire arising in you. A new love is born. Yes, submission is the secret of knowledge, surrender is the secret of knowledge. It is not an intellectual effort, but a total submersion, a merging of the self. That's why Bauls talk more about love and less about knowledge, because love is the only thing in the world which cannot be attained in any other way than by loving. Now, it is possible some day that even swimming can be taught to you without taking you to the river. They have invented ways to teach driving without ever taking you to the road. You simply sit in a car in a room: nothing moves, because there is nowhere, no place to move. You simply sit in the car behind the wheel, and a film is shown on the walls. The road moves, so you feel as if you are moving on the road. On both sides, the street is moving. A movie is shown fast; it goes on moving fast. There are turns and things, and you have to do the right things at the wheel. The teacher can show you whether you are doing wrong or right, and you are simply sitting in the car. The car is not moving, the road is moving in the movie, just on the sides. You can learn it. It seems to be safer. I think someday or other you can just lie down on your mattress, and a movie of a river will be all around, and you can start. It is possible. At least a rudimentary knowledge may become possible. But love? -- There seems to be no way. Many people are trying movies to learn about love. Many people go on 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, but to know about love is not to know love. In fact, the more you know about love, the less will be 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. The whole world 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 on acting the same roles, they go on playing the same games. As they are playing on the stage, they go on playing in life. On the 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's 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 not 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 the courage. Bauls are very courageous people. They say: Only a connoisseur of the flavors of love.... Love has many flavors... Love has many dimensions, many nuances. Love is not one 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 had many words for love, because there are so many loves. The English language is poor in that way, hmm? Because you love a car also, and you love your woman and you 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: that is totally different. It is affection, but not in the same way. If you watch, you will find many nuances of love. The single word "love" has many words hidden in it. And one has to know all about love by moving in all the dimensions. If you have not known any facet of love, your understanding about love will lack that much. One has to know all the aspects and all the subtle differences. That's what the Bauls mean when they say: 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. A connoisseur, with closed eyes, can just feel your hand and see...and understand the language. Have you not watched it sometimes: when somebody looks at you with a deep lust in his eyes, you can immediately feel? When somebody looks with deep love, you can see the difference. When somebody looks with affection, you can feel the difference. But these are very rudimentary things because compassion also has many layers. When a Buddha is there, his compassion has a totally different quality. When you have compassion it is more like sympathy, less like compassion. When a Buddha has compassion, it has nothing of sympathy in it. It is pure. When Buddha has love showering on you, it has nothing that you have known about love up to now. Only a Buddha can know that. It has no passion in it; it is very cool. It is not hot -- not that it has no warmth; it has warmth, but still it is very cool. It will cool you down if you come close to a Buddha. It will help you to become less excited, more collected. It will not create a turmoil within you. It will subside all turmoil; it will be a soothing force. It will surround you like a subtle climate and soothe you. It will be like a lullaby. You will start feeling, falling asleep, as if just close to your mother's heart. It has something of the mother, something of the father, something of the beloved, something of the child. It has every subtle nuance in it. It has all the dimensions of love in a great harmony. When you come around Buddha, it is an orchestra of all the flavors of love. Sometimes he looks like a child; you can play with him. His smile or his being simply gives you a feeling that he is just a child -- you can mother him. Sometimes he is like a mother and you are like a small child. Sometimes he looks like a beloved -- you can love him, only him, and nobody else. But sometimes he is just like a friend. He is all. These changes happen because of you: your outlook changes, your vision changes. Your eyes are not yet clear and fixed. You cannot see his totality. You circumlocate him. At one time you see one aspect, at another time you see another aspect -- because you cannot comprehend the whole. Only a connoisseur of the flavors of love can comprehend the language of a lover's heart, others have no clue. Not even a clue is possible for others. You will have to move into the world of love; and don't ask how. You will have to move into the dark; And don't ask for a map -- because that very asking is against love. That's why trust is needed, Shraddha. If you trust a person, you say: "Okay. If you send me in the dark, I will go. If you send me into death, I will go." 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 demands 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 so 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. When you hear about love it seems very simple and easy; but look at the demands. On the path of meditation, that which will be demanded on the last step, is demanded on the first step on the path of love. The meditator will be asked to surrender his ego only at the last step: when he moves from savikalpa samadhi to nirvikalpa samadhi, when he moves from the mind to no mind; only at the last step. First he goes on purifying his mind, he goes on purifying his ego. He goes on making it more and more subtle, more and more subtle, refined, cultured. Then just a trace remains. On the last step, he has to drop that trace. Love demands the impossible. It says: on the first step you have to drop the ego. There is no need to refine it and there is no need to work on it. Because one has to drop it, so why bother carrying it? Drop it here, now. Trust arises on the path of meditation at the last stage. Trust arises only when you are arriving home. When the arrival is so close and when you are almost approaching, and you can see the door and you can see the house and you can see that you have reached, then trust arises -- you say: "Yes." But on the path of love, trust is asked on the first step. The first step of love is the same as the last step of meditation. The path is very easy if you are daring, if you are almost a dare-devil. If you are almost mad and ready to risk all without any condition, the path is very easy -- because it completes on the first step. The first step becomes the last step. Here you surrender, and not even a split second is lost and you have arrived. ...the language of a lover's heart, others have no clue. People who are very learned in the ways of meditation, in the ways of intellectual comprehension, contemplation, concentration, have no clue about love. They simply don't know that language. The taste of time rests in the core of the fruit, and even experts know of no easy way to reach it. And this love the Bauls talk about, or rather, sing about, dance about, is just hidden inside you at the very core of your being. It is already there. You have just to find a way to reach to your own innermost core -- the adhar manush, the essential man. It is not something that has to be achieved, it is already there. It is not something that has to be earned, it is a gift of God. The moment you were created, that very same moment that 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. Bauls say: "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 other treasures that don't belong to you, in search of other treasures that can never belong to you. That's why a Baul lives like a beggar. That is simply symbolic. He says: "I am not searching for any other treasure. I am enough unto myself. My treasure is too much. I am a king already. I don't need any other kingdom; my kingdom is already here." He lives like a beggar, but if you come across a Baul you will see that he lives like a king. Even kings are not so kingly. Even-kings are not so blissful as a Baul is. His whole life consists of bliss. He knows no other taste: he knows no anxiety, he knows no worry. He lives in some unknown dimension with tremendous grace. Having nothing, he has everything. Possessing nothing, he possesses the whole world. The Bauls sing: The mirror of the sky reflects my soul. Oh Baul of the road, oh Baul, my heart! The mirror of the sky reflects my soul. Oh, my senseless heart, you have failed to cultivate the human land. Cultivated, it could have yielded a harvest of gold. When the life, the mind and the eyes are in agreement, the target is within your reach. You can see the formless one with bare eyes. "When the life, the mind and the eyes are in agreement...." hmm? That is the way to find the inside. When you are in agreement, when there is no conflict inside you, that is the way. That is why Bauls insist on being without conflict, on being natural, spontaneous. Don't create any division within yourself, otherwise you will never be able to reach -- because a tremendous quality of agreement is needed. When you fall into harmony, the door is open. "When the life, the mind and the eyes are in agreement, the target is within your reach. You can see the formless one with bare eyes."" "Forget not," they say, "that your body contains the whole of existence." "I am fulfilled," they sing, "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?" A Baul is fulfilled the moment he comes to a deep agreement within himself. His singing and his dancing is nothing but an effort to fall into agreement with himself. Have you watched somebody dancing? What happens? Have you observed yourself sometimes dancing? What happens? Dance seems to be one of the most penetrating things, in which one falls into a harmony. Your body, your mind, your soul all fall into a harmony in dancing. Dancing is one of the most spiritual things there is. If you really dance, you cannot think. If you really dance, the body is used so deeply that the whole energy becomes fluid. A dancer loses shape, fixedness. A dancer becomes a movement, a process. A dancer is not an entity: he is movement, he is energy. He melts. Great dancers, by and by, melt. And a dancer cannot retain his ego because if he retains the ego, that will be a jarring note in his dance. A real dancer loses his ego in it. He forgets that he is. The dancer is lost; only the dance remains. Then the door opens because you are one unity. Now the soul is not separate, the mind is not separate, the body is not separate. All have fallen in one line. All have become one, melting into each other, merging into each other. It is said about Nijinsky, one of the greatest dancers in the world, that there were moments when he would take jumps, and he would come back so slowly that it was almost impossible. He would fall back featherlike, as if gravitation had lost its power over him. Scientists were worried: "This should not happen, it cannot happen" -- but it was happening. No other dancer has been capable in that way. And of course, Nijinsky went mad; he became a Baul. His is one of the madnesses which has not yet been understood. And because he was in the West, it was impossible to comprehend what had happened to him. He was confined to a psychiatric hospital, forced, given electric shocks, insulin shots. Had he been in the East he would have become one of the greatest Bauls. His madness was nothing to be treated, it was something to be revered. But how did he become mad? He became mad through his dancing. When he was asked what happens to him, he said: "It happens only when I am lost, so I cannot say anything about it. If I am, then it never happens. I have tried it. If I am there, deliberately trying it, consciously trying, it never happens. But there are moments when I am lost. Then simply, I don't know who jumps -- and then it happens. I am also surprised. I have no explanation for it, but it happens only when I am lost." That is what Bauls say: when you dance and you become a whirlwind and, by and by, you are completely lost in your dancing, it happens. Something breaks down inside you. The barriers are lost. You become one unity. A great orgasm spreads all over your being. You are in tune with existence in those moments. These moments are the satoris of Zen, but Bauls have a better way to attain them. Zen has to be worked on for twelve, fifteen, twenty, thirty years. It is a very slow process. It is the path of meditation. Bauls can attain to it more easily. Just the day you decide that: "I am ready to drop my ego," you become available to God and God becomes available to you. The essential man suddenly arises over the non-essential; there is a mutation. And this is the moment when you are full of love, when you are love, when your energy is love. This is the moment when you can bless the whole existence. When there is no conflict within you, there cannot be any conflict between you and the existence. That is the secret: drop all conflict within you, and your conflict with the existence is also dropped simultaneously. Become one within you and you have become one with the existence. The taste of time rests in the core of the fruit, and even experts know of no easy way to reach it. In fact, there is no easy way to reach it, because it is hard to drop the ego. And that is the only way. Honey is hidden within the lotus bloom -- but the bee knows it. Dung beetles nestle in dung, discounting honey. Bauls say that intellectuals are dung-beetles. The pundits, the scholars, are dung-beetles. They will never find the way to the lotus...only the bee. Become a bee; become a lover. Because the bee loves honey, it finds the way. Why cannot the dung-beetle find the way? It finds a certain way; it finds the way to the dung. Because love is the way. Bauls say: "Whatsoever you love you become, and whatsoever is 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 like that. You will become a dung-beetle. Don't love dung. If you are to love, then love something of the divine, something...something that transcends things, something that transcends forms, something for which you will have to raise your eyes to the sky. Love aGourishankar; love the Himalayan peaks. If you love something like dung, you will move into dung because we always find the way. Wherever 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. There is a story about Solomon: 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, about whether he was really as wise 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 is false." Then the woman brought another flower from her bag and she said: "What about this?" It was exactly like the first, but it was 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. Miles away the flowers have bloomed, and bees will come rushing. Almost a supra-sense exists in them; that supra-sense is-nothing but love. You will find your way to the object you 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. Bauls say: "When there is no fear, just the love is enough; it will monitor you and it will guide you." Honey is hidden within the lotus bloom -- but the bee knows it. Dung beetles nestle in dung, discounting honey. Submission is the secret of knowledge. Surrender is the secret of knowledge, because surrender is the secret of love-and love is the only knowledge of worth. OSHO : The Beloved, Volume 1, Chapter 1 Top

The Disease Called Seriousness..

OSHO : HOW TO FLOW WITH LIFE WITHOUT BEING SERIOUS

BUT CERTAIN THINGS HAVE BEEN ACHIEVED ONLY BECAUSE SOME PEOPLE HAVE BEEN
- MAYBE THE WORD 'SERIOUS' IT IS NOT GOOD, BUT, RATHER, 'INTENSE'.

Intensity is a very different thing from seriousness.

If you are serious, you can never really be intense; you can only be tense. That's a different thing. With seriousness, you can never be intense and deep. You will always be shallow.

Life is not serious at all. It is just a nonserious play - with nothing to be achieved, with nowhere to reach. It is just a play, with no end. Serious is always end-oriented. It means that you are living in order to achieve something, and life will be meaningless if you don't achieve it.

This is seriousness: the means lies in the end, not in The here and now. The end must be achieved.
If you achieve it, then it is okay. If you don't achieve it, then everything ii lost. You are serious because you have made some condition for your life. You have identified the meaning of your life by some condition that has to be fulfilled.
But you can never achieve anything because nothing is static, everything is constantly changing.



You fix something today, but by tomorrow nothing is going to be the same. Not even you will be the same; everything will have changed completely. But in your mind, the end remains the same. The whole situation has changed now, so you can never achieve what you want. That is why there is so much frustration Why so much preparation? You try, you think, you plan, you work, and then there is no achievement.

The thing that you desire never happens, it never comes. If life was a static, fixed thing - not dynamic and flowing - then you could achieve what you wanted, but then life would be a death. Life is life because it is dynamic, changing. You cannot predict its course, it is unpredictable. It is dynamic and flowing - always flowing nowhere.
If you are serious, then you cannot flow. Then you are frozen inside; then you become just a dead stone. Then there are resistances around you. You cannot melt, you cannot change as life changes.

You have a fixed pattern, a fixed shape, and because of that shape you will resist change. Then you are not flowing with life, you are struggling against it. Seriousness creates frozenness, and frozenness creates struggle. You can just let go.


Be ready to be anyone, to be anything, to be in any shape at all. Any shape is good: trees are good and dogs are good and man is good.




If you are ready to be anything at all - anything that life requires - you will be more alive, you will be able to live more intensely. Intensity is killed when you have become identified with a particular form, a particular way of being. Then you are shallow because you are concerned with your form not with your being. Then you will be tense, not intense.

It you are ready to exist in any way whatsoever then you have become part of the ocean of life. Then there are no more waves, there is no rising and falling. You have become the ocean itself. You are ready to be anything: to rise or to fall, be or not to be, Then you can flow with everything. And the more you flow, the more alive you are.

So if you know life, you know that life is not serious at all. Religious people have made it serious because they a!c anti-life. But to me, that is not religion at all. That is just a metaphysics for suicide.
To me, relig on means a very non - serious attitude: very childlike, very innocent.


A serious person can never be innocent, and one who is innocent can never be serious. They are contradictory; they cannot exist together. A child is never serious, but he is very intense. In everything he does, he is intense. If he is playing he is intense; if he is angry he is intense.


But an old man is never intense. Hi is serious. He will turn even play into work because his play becomes a fight, a struggle; a competition. Their is either defeat or victory. All kinds of nonsense will emerge, it will not be just a play. Intensity is something else. It is not seriousness, it is something altogether different.


Whenever there is seriousness, sadness is about to come. You cannot enjoy seriousness, you cannot laugh with seriousness. Saints have never laughed. Sadness is bound to be somewhere around the corner, always.

Seriousness is sad, it cannot laugh. And even if it laughs, it is only a release mechanism. The laughter is not innocent it is only a release mechanism. A serious person can laugh but it is only to release the tension of seriousness. Then again he is ready to be serious, and more tensions are accumulated.


If I tell a joke, I create tension in you, expectation. curiosity. What is going to happen? How will it turn out? You become tense with expectation. You become serious, your mind begins to work. How is the joke going to end? if it ends just as you expected it to, you will not laugh because then there is no release


. But if the end turns out to be completely unimagined, if it is a complete turnabout; if you never expected that this could be the end, then the tension that has been brought to a climax is released. You laugh. But the laughter is not innocent because it is just a release of tension. Every joke has to create a tension in you. Then, when you laugh, you feel released.

Innocent laughter is something very different. It is not a release mechanism, it is a way of living. It is just a way of living!

Take laughing as a way of living. Exist as laughter You will be absolutely nonserious. It may be that you will not be able to achieve anything, but what is the meaning of achievement? Even one who achieves - what does he achieve7 Even when achieving, nothing is achieved.



Then whole absurdity is this: that even if you achieve something, nothing is achieved and nothing lasts. But the nonachieving mind gains much, without gaining anything.

Every moment, one who has a nonachieving mind gains. What he gains may not be something very beautiful - in the end he may not have achieved anything - but he will be rich inside. Every moment was rich: the achievement is in the being. He may not be a great man, a famous man - a great scientist, a great painter - he may be no one really, but he can die peacefully; he can die lovingly.


He is rich inside. Life, as it was, has given much. Nothing was snatched, nothing was taken with a struggle. It was a blessing, it was a beatitude, it was a benediction. As it was without any conditions.
The mind that is trying to achieve is saying to life, to the whole cosmos, "I can be happy only if 'this' is happening." The person is living with a condition.


You cannot place any conditions on the whole. The whole will never hear your conditions, you will never feel any resonance from the whole if you have any conditions. Your own condition will become a stone around your neck. You will be crushed under it, by your own hands.



It is not that the whole crushes you: you crush yourself with your own stone.
Your conditions create a barrier between you and the whole. The whole cannot flow in you because you have a condition. You say, "Come in. But first fulfill this much.." Then the whole cannot flow in you and you cannot flow m the whole. Then everything is crippled and diseased.

Don't place any conditions on the whole; don't make any bargains with the whole. Don't compete with the whole, don't struggle with the whole, and then you will be holy. Flow into the whole and let it flow into you. Unconditional movement, unmotivated movement. Then you will be non-serious, intense. You will live blissfully; there will be no possibility of sadness.

Then there can be no frustration, it is impossible. No one can frustrate you. Whatsoever happens is good. Then good is not something opposite to bad; it is just a feeling. Whatsoever happens is good:
there is nothing opposite to good.

This I call a religious mind: nonserious, playful, innocent - without any struggle.


Someone has written me a letter. He writes that he believed in someone as if he was bhagwan, a God. For fifteen years continuously he believed in him. Then one day he saw that the man he had believed in was angry He writes that on that day not only did that man become just human - not a God - but from that day on "I cannot believe that any human being can ever be bhagwan, can ever be a God."



I have written to him that there are two possibilities. "If one whom you believed to be divine became angry, there are two possibilities. Either this man is not divine - or your definition of divine was wrong!"
But no, your definition can never be wrong. This man who you thought was divine must be wrong.
Your definition is more meaningful to you than fifteen years of faith and rust.


But who says that the divine cannot be angry? Who says it? We don't know, but we have a particular definition. Who says that the divine cannot be angry? Of course a divine person must be angry in a divine way - that's another thing.
We have certain definitions. But life always transcends definitions so we are frustrated. Because of our definitions we are frustrated.


I have written to the man that that person was very honest: "He could be angry in front of you." It is very simple not to be angry in front of a person who has believed for fifteen years that you are bhagwan. Not to be angry is very simple, it is not a difficult thing. He was very sincere, he flowed: he could be angry.


Rinzai died as a master and his disciple, the chief disciple, begin to weep. These were at least one lakh people there. They were very confused because this chief disciple was known to be enlightened. How could he weep? He must not weep because if even an enlightened person weeps then the whole point of it is lost. Then there is no difference between one who is enlightened and those who are not.




Soon friends came to talk to him and requested him not to weep because his whole image would be destroyed. But the disciple said, "When have I promised you that I shall not weep? Was it a condition that you would believe that I am enlightened if I don't weep? When was this promise made? Two things: either decide that I am not enlightened, or change your definition!"



An enlightened person can weep - of course, in an enlightened way. Really, a person who is one with life just flows. There is no resistance. Anything that comes from him, anything that happens, just happens. He has no resistance. He is not going tO say that such and such must not happen.
He has become the whole, he was said yes to everything.


We have created an image of divine persons, realized persons, according to our own definitions. If Mahavir laughs, his disciples will think that something has gone wrong. It is inconceivable that he should laugh - because of the disciples' definition, a dead definition. Definitions can never be alive because anything that is living changes, and definitions cannot change. And if a definition changes, it is not a definition at all. A definition is fixed, but life is never fixed.
So don't think in terms of opposites. Just think about one thing: that you must be flowing. And let anything happen. Accept it. If you are going to be a loser, then be a loser.


If you are going to be defeated, then be one who is defeated. And if you are ready to be defeated, to be a loser, then no one can defeat you because the whole thing becomes nonsense. Losing is meaningful because winning is meaningful, because you have a stake in it. Because you have it as a condition that you must win, losing becomes hard. you feel defeated, frustrated.


To me, a divine existence means to just flow. If you win, that is good. If you lose, that too is good.


 (Osho - The Eternal Quest #7, title:

(The Disease Called Seriousness)

tremendous joy to those who can understand....

Beloved Osho,

I do not understand why enlightened masters are critical of each other. Are they not all working towards the higher good? Are they not different flavors of the same truth?

"The question you have asked is almost impossible to answer for the simple reason that you are not enlightened yet. You don’t know the ways of the enlightened ones. You don’t know their devices, you don’t know their methods; hence the misunderstanding. An ancient story may help you.... In a great city there were two sweet shops, and one day the owners of both the shops started fighting with each other. Naturally they had no other way to fight, so they started throwing sweets at each other. And the whole city gathered and people were enjoying the sweets that were falling on the street.

When two enlightened masters criticize each other it brings tremendous joy to those who can understand. Its taste is just unbelievable. They are not enemies, their fight is not of the ego. Their fight has a totally different context.

They fight because they know one thing: that the goal is one, but the paths are many. And each master has to defend his path, knowing perfectly well that other paths are as valid as his. But if he starts saying that all the paths are valid, he will not have the impact, the influence on his people. The journey is long and he needs absolute trust.

He is not a philosopher propounding a system of philosophy. His basic concern is that your commitment to the path should be total. To make it total he condemns all other paths, he criticizes all other ways. It is just out of compassion for you. He knows the people on the other path will also reach; and he knows that out of compassion the master on the other path has to criticize him, has to criticize his ways.

This is just a simple methodology to protect the disciple from influences that can take him astray. And the mind is very, very clever in going astray. If all the paths are valid, then what is the necessity of commitment? If all the paths are valid, then what is the necessity of being total?

If all the paths are valid, then why not travel all the paths, why not go on changing, enjoying different ways, different methods, different sceneries? Each path will pass through different lands; there are paths that will go through the desert, and there are paths which will go through the mountains, and there are paths which will pass through beautiful flowering trees.

But if you travel some time on one path and then you change the path, you will have to start again from ABC. Whatever you have learned on one path is invalid on another path, and if you go on keeping it within you it is going to create tremendous confusion. You are already in a great mess; no master wants you to be more confused!

Your mind always wants change. It does not know devotion; it loves fashions, its interest is always in some novelty. So it will go on moving from one path to another path, becoming more and more confused because each path has its own language, each path has its own unique methods, and each master is going to defend his path against all the other paths.

If you move on many paths you will collect contradictory arguments; you will become so much divided you will not know what to do. And if it becomes your habit to change paths – because the new has a certain attraction for the mind – you will move a few feet on one path, a few feet on another path, but you will never complete the journey.

One day Jalaluddin Rumi took all his students, disciples and devotees to a field. That was his way to teach them things of the beyond, through the examples of the world. He was not a theoretician, he was a very practical man. The disciples were thinking, “What could be the message, going to that faraway field... and why can’t he say it here?”

But when they reached the field, they understood that they were wrong and he was right. The farmer seemed to be almost an insane man. He was digging a well in the field – and he had already dug eight incomplete wells. He would go a few feet and then he would find that there was no water. Then he would start digging another well... and the same story was continued. He had destroyed the whole field and he had not yet found water.

The master, Jalaluddin Rumi, told his disciples, “Can you understand something? If this man had been total and had put his whole energy into only one well, he would have reached to the deepest sources of water long ago. But the way he is going he will destroy the whole field and he will never be able to make a single well. With so much effort he is simply destroying his own land, and getting more and more frustrated, disappointed: what kind of a desert has he purchased? It is not a desert, but one has to go deep to find the sources of water.”

He turned to his disciples and asked them, “Are you going to follow this insane farmer? Sometimes on one path, sometimes on another path, sometimes listening to one, sometimes listening to another... you will collect much knowledge, but all that knowledge is simply junk, because it is not going to give you the enlightenment you were looking for. It is not going to lead you to the waters of eternal life.”

Masters enjoy tremendously criticizing others. If the others are really enlightened, they also enjoy being criticized. They know that the purpose of both is the same: to protect the vagrant mind of the disciple. To keep him on one track, they have to deny that there is any other path anywhere that can lead you except this one.

This is not said out of an egoistic attitude; this is said out of love. This is simply a device to make you committed, devoted. The journey is long, the night is long, and if you go astray you can go on round and round for eternity without finding anything.

[...]

Gautam Buddha criticized the seers of the Vedas, he criticized the seers of the Upanishads, he criticized Mahavira, he criticized everybody that he could find – Krishna, Rama, all the Hindu gods. Continuously for forty years he was criticizing every old scripture, every old prophet, every old savior.

But he was not an enemy of anyone. He was criticizing all those people so that you could be unconditioned, so that you could be freed from the clinging with the past which cannot help you. When a living enlightened being is present, he cannot allow you to remain clinging with the dead, which can only be a weight on your heart but cannot become wings for your freedom.

It needs tremendous insight and meditative understanding to have a little glimpse of the world of an enlightened person. I have criticized many: only a few of them were enlightened; most of them were simply frauds. The frauds have to be absolutely exposed to humanity.

Even those who were enlightened have become only a tradition, a convention, a dead belief. You have to be freed from their grip also, because they cannot help you, they can only hinder your path. They can become your chains, but they cannot become your freedom.

I can become your freedom. I am your freedom.

When I am gone I hope there may be still courageous people in the world to criticize me, so that I don’t become a hindrance on anybody’s path. And those who will criticize me will not be my enemies; neither am I the enemy of those whom I have criticized. The working of the enlightened masters just has to be understood.

You should remember only one word, and that is compassion – compassion for you, compassion for all those who are still not centered in their being, who are still far away from themselves, who have to be called back home."

~ Osho

Satyam Shivam Sundram.

Now there is no more father and no more son...disciple and Master...

During a rare interview in the seventies,

Osho's father tells Sarjano about

' little Mohan's ’childhood

and how he took sannyas :

Devateerth Bharti has the innocent and stern face of a Mediterranean peasant. When it is innocent, he looks like a precociously aged Neapolitan kid, and when stern he likens a Byzantine icon.

He gets up every morning at four o’clock, and meditates in solitude and in silence until seven. To move around he leans on a walking stick, even though his body appears still very lightweight, like the body of a youngster.

Sometimes I have the fantasy that the weight he carries and forces him to use a walking stick, is the burden to have such a son!

The mystery of his relationship with his son has always astonished me very much, because he never talks about it, he does not invocate; neither has he claimed any special rights. He appears every morning at the Master’s discourse with his wife and his sons, where he always sits in the vicinity of the 15th row, never close, never far, and sits there totally still, without ever changing expression, at most bowing his head for a moment, until the Master stops talking.

There is something detached and tragic in his namaste towards the son when he is leaving at the end of the discourse; he gets up slowly and returns to Francis House, where he lives together with the whole family.

The family, which includes cousins, nephews, and a variety of other relatives, creates a small and colorful tribe inside the ashram. They have their own kitchen, from where at all times the aroma of chai drifts from, mixed with the smell of chapattis, making the place appear like an ancient and pastoral island amid the cosmopolitan and technological trend of the commune.

His life runs therefore in a patriarchal and rural way: the top spot of the dinner table belongs to him, and the first word is his right, even though he never exercises this privilege; if he really has to answer to somebody, he often limits himself to a smile or a silent glance.

Every afternoon, just before sunset he goes for a long walk among the trees of Koregaon Park, usually in company of a few members of his family. Like everything else, this walk too proceeds in utter silence, and when they meet some Indian sannyasins, he addresses them with a silent namaste, while most of those people bow humbly to touch his feet, homage that he receives impassively, as if all these manifestations were not addressed to him particularly.

After the walk, the whole family gathers until dinnertime to listen to Indian music, or to dance some kirtans in the vast living room of the house, which is transformed into a crowded bedroom during the night.

If some western sannyasin comes to the door out of curiosity or because he is attracted by the music, it is always Devateerth who invites him or her with a smile to enter and take part in the dances. The capacity of Indian sannyasins to abandon themselves to dance until reaching a state of ecstasy is almost unique and extraordinary, and they look with a mixture of curiosity and pity at those westerners who adventure into dance with some ‘disco steps’ and great mental control.

After dinner, invariably composed of rice and dhal along with some chapattis and a little bhaji, the tribe lays down a dozen of mattresses in the living room and everybody goes to sleep.

It was with great embarrassment that I asked Osho if I could interview his parents, but his answer was, as usual, adamant: “You can do whatever you wish, there is no need to ask me… and take Maitreya with you as a translator!”

And that's how, full of curiosity mixed with wonder and a lot of emotions that one day I find myself facing the door to Francis House with Maitreya, an old Indian writer and former member of parliament that the Master had suggested to me as an interpreter, since his parents speak only Hindi and Marathi. Once in front of them, I'm captured by an uncontainable emotion, because these two people, beyond popular iconography and dim images created by movies or religious posters, look to me just like Joseph and Mary must have looked like, with the difference that the latter never recognized the enlightenment of their son, neither did they ever become his disciples.

They are sitting in front of me in silence; they emanate a tremendous peace with no questions and no answers, which embarrasses me even more, to the point that now all my questions and all my curiosity appear to me very risible. Facing this grace I don't know from where to start anymore, for the silence is so intense and sweet, so pregnant of meanings and secret answers that I will never be capable of revealing... and it is so difficult to break this silence.

Says he: ”Our little Mohan (Osho's original name) was a totally normal child, like everybody else, and there was nothing extraordinary about him, nothing out of a normal behavior for a child of that age. Until he was seven years old he was living with his grandfather who was a very rich man, but after his death he came to stay with us, and we started to provide him personally with some education, and to teach him how to read and write. Even in this he was a normal kid, not particularly of a genius type, perhaps just a little more dynamic than other children, more restless, which seems was creating some problems with our neighbors... or at least this is what they were saying.

“At home he was never creating any problem, and often we didn't even realize his presence as he was so quiet and silent, but outdoors he must have been a real pest! To tell you the truth, there were always some people coming to complain about him, saying that he was a bad boy and very mean too, because he was always arguing with everybody; he was fighting with the other kids, and he would tease everybody in front of him, often with some cruel joke that he used to define as ‘my special treatment ' , and on top of it he was even making fun of the village authorities, so ultimately he was making everybody crazy! However, to us all this never occurred, and we were always surprised about all these complaints.

“Just think that I have beaten him up just once in my entire life, and this happened because he was only ten years old and had come back in the middle of the night, without even informing anybody. I didn't ask him where he had been, but I hit him because our pacts were very clear: during the day he was free to do whatsoever he liked, but before night he was supposed to come back home within a certain hour, like every other good Jain who retires before dark.”

Q.: “I understand that the family religion was Jainism... was little Mohan respectful of the tradition?”

A.: “When he was a kid he wasn't really a practitioner, but he was not critical about the family religion either; sometimes he would even come spontaneously on his own to the temple with us, but he always looked bored to me. However, during his secondary school year he became more and more critical towards all the religions, and he was very much influenced by communism, starting to use very harsh words about any religion, Jainism included.”

Q.: “Were his criticisms expressing an authentic religious feeling, a real search for truth, or were they coming from a Marxist point of view, like ‘religion is the opium of the people’?”

A.: “That's exactly what he was saying, and all the time, for that matter! He had become a Marxist, but he was limiting himself to be a theorist, an avid student of Marx, Lenin, Hegel; yet I believe that he had never become a militant, also because our village was not offering much space for active politics.”

Q.: “Were you disappointed about your son's choice, about his being critical towards religion? Did you use to judge him negatively, like a rebel of some sort?”

A.: “In those times India was still under British dominion and all of our family was of a nationalistic spirit, for a revolutionary independency, and my brother went even to prison for this idea. Hence, politics was a common fact in our family, and we were very open-minded people, not one of those orthodox families, closed and reactionary. Therefore his political choice didn’t disturb us at all, because he was already a very rigorous individual, of absolute sincerity, and it was clear to everybody that he knew very well what he was doing... ”

Q.: “Many youngsters when they leave their home to go to university tend to break away from their family, and go live on their own. Was this the case with the young Osho too?”

A.: “No, when he attended university he would always come to see us. He was deeply attached to his family, and never expressed any desire to separate from us; even when he got his doctorate and began teaching in faraway places, he would regularly embark on a long journey just to spend some days with all of his family. He showed us the same respectful and loving attitude that he had in his childhood. Every summer he would come to spend his holidays in his native village, and they were always beautiful meetings.”

Q.: “When did you start realizing that you had a son who was a little special, so to say?”

A.: “Throughout his days at the university he appeared perfectly ordinary to us, even though he had shown to be very intelligent and brilliant... it would have been impossible not to notice it, because in those times in India orators where much in demand, and so were good public discourses; it was common to have some debates with two orators opposed to one another, with the winner chosen by open acclamation. In addition, our son was winning one debate after another, and he had achieved an immense reputation, but we could have never had imagined what was going to follow later!

“We had very normal ambitions for him, that he would become a good lawyer, or a teacher... but then, once he got his doctorate in philosophy he came back home and spent four months unemployed, until one day through some acquaintances he was invited to hold a series of conferences at some big university. It was there where it became obvious that his discourses turned out to be so fascinating, so transporting, that soon the Aula Magna was no longer sufficient to contain all the students and professors who were attending those meetings. At some point it became necessary to move everybody into open air, to the university's courtyard, which was always full of people even when it was raining. By now both students and professors were bowing in front of him, as if he was a guru of some sort, and he was just twenty-five years old!

“All our worries regarding his future disappeared completely when the Minister for Education met with him, and told him how sorry he was that for that particular year all the professorships had been announced already, and if he wanted to teach at some university he would have to wait for the next year. But my son told him that if a Minister was sincere with his praise and really wanted to, he could find him a job even the next day; and that's how he got his first assignment. But since there was nothing else available, he was assigned as a Sanskrit teacher to Raipur College, even though he was a laureate in philosophy! I have heard from many people that never before has Sanskrit been taught with such profundity and such enthrallment.”

Q.: “Did he ever talk with you about his experience of enlightenment that happened when he was 21 years old?”

A.: “No, he has never given any hint about it! Only many years later I got to know that my son had declared during a discourse in Mumbai to be enlightened, and we heard about it while we were having dinner through an uncle, who was talking about it as being one of the rumors that were circulating about Osho, and none of us was much interested! Many years passed before I heard about this story again, but in reality I felt that my son was not my son anymore, that he had transcended his being, and I realized that only in the moment when I took sannyas from him.”

Q.: “When Osho began to have disciples in Mumbai, initiating people into sannyas, was he still in contact with his family? Did you come to know about it from him directly?”

A.: “He actually started giving sannyas in Manali, in the foothills of the Himalaya, and we got to know it through others since we never had a chance to visit him there. However, we were happy to know that his spiritual movement was growing, that disciples were coming to him from all over the world. All this was for us a source of great happiness... even though it was not yet clear to us what it was all about! And what to say about me, that I have been the last member of the family to ask for sannyas from my son. He never invited me to take sannyas, as he also never invited anybody of our family, and I think nobody in the world; he was just waiting in silence for each one of us to become ready, with our own timing and inclination.

“My wife had invited me many times to take sannyas from him, but I always used to answer that I wasn't mentally ready for it, even if sometimes I would go to listen his discourses, but nothing else! I even participated in some of his Meditation Camps, but it took me over two years to decide for this adventure, until one day in 1975... I was here in this room, there was a full moon in the sky, and at dawn I was sitting in meditation as usual, when suddenly my body started trembling and shaking on it's own, and it went on for a couple of hours. Finally when I came back to my senses my sons asked me what was going on, and I told them that what I’d been waiting for years had just started happening to me; somebody decided to inform Osho, and even though it was only four in the morning, they woke him up to tell him about the latest events. After a few minutes he appeared in my room, and I bowed to him and I touched his feet... and Osho bowed himself and touched my feet, so I bowed again and I touched his feet once more, starting to cry with no control, and at this point he asked Laxmi, his secretary in those years, to give him her mala, and once he had the mala in his hands he placed it around my neck like a garland of love... and this is how I became a sannyasin.

“The next day Osho sent me some orange robes through my daughter Niklam, and my new name, ‘Devateerth Bharti’.”

Q.: “Do you still have some kind of personal relationship with Osho?”

A.: “Now that feeling doesn't exist anymore. Now there is no more father and no more son. Now I am a disciple and he is my Master... ”

-----

Copyright © 2010
Swami Svatantra Sarjano 

for Osho News

learn trust - nothing else is needed...

“If you want to learn anything, 
learn trust - nothing else is needed. 

If you are miserable, 
nothing else will help - 

learn trust.

If you don't feel any meaning in life
and you feel meaningless,
nothing will help - learn trust.

Trust gives meaning because
trust makes you capable of allowing
the whole descend upon you.”

Osho

You cannot avoid truth..

It is better to face it, 
it is better to accept it, 
it is better to live it. 

Once you start living a life of truth,

authenticity -- of your original face --

all troubles by and by disappear

because the conflict drops
and you are no more divided.

Your voice has a unity then,
your whole being becomes an orchestra.

Right now,
when you say something,
your body says something else;

when your tongue says something,
your eyes go on saying
something else simultaneously.

Many times people come to me

and I ask them,

"How are you?"

And they say,

"We are very, very happy."

And I cannot believe it
because their faces are so dull --

no joy, no delight!

Their eyes have no shining in them, no light.

And when they say,

"We are happy,"

even the word 'happy'

does not sound very happy.

It sounds as if they are dragging it.

Their tone, their voice, their face,
the way they are sitting or standing --
everything belies it, says something else.

Start watching people.

When they say that they are happy, watch.

Watch for a clue.

Are they really happy?

And immediately you will be aware
that some part of them
is saying something else.

And then by and by watch yourself.

When you are saying that
you are happy and you are not,
there will be a disturbance in your breathing.

Your breathing cannot be natural.

It is impossible.

Because the truth was that

you were not happy.

If you had said,

"I am unhappy,"

your breathing
would have remained natural.

There was no conflict.

But you said, "I am happy."

Immediately
you are repressing something --
something that was coming up,
you have forced down.

In this very effort
your breathing changes its rhythm;

it is no longer rhythmical.

Your face is no longer graceful,
your eyes become cunning.

First watch others
because it will be easier to watch others.

You can be more objective about them.

And when you have found clues about them
use the same clues about yourself.

And see --

when you speak truth,
your voice has a musical tone to it;

when you speak untruth,
something is there like a jarring note.

When you speak truth
you are one, together;

when you speak untruth
you are not together,
a conflict has arisen.

Watch these subtle phenomena,

because
they are the consequence
of togetherness or untogetherness.

Whenever you are together,

not falling apart;

whenever you are one, in unison,
suddenly you will see you are happy.

That is the meaning of the word 'yoga'.

That's what we mean by a yogi:

one who is together, in unison;

whose parts are all interrelated
and not contradictory, interdependent,
not in conflict, at rest with each other.

A great friendship exists within his being.

He is whole.

Sometimes it happens that
you become one,
in some rare moment.

Watch the ocean,
the tremendous wildness of it --

and suddenly you forget your split,

your schizophrenia;

you relax.

Or, moving in the Himalayas,

seeing the virgin snow
on the Himalaya peaks,
suddenly a coolness surrounds you
and you need not be false

because
there is no other human being to be false to.

You fall together.

Or, listening to beautiful music,

you fall together.

Whenever, in whatsoever situation,

you become one,

a peace, a happiness, a bliss,

surrounds you, arises in you.

You feel fulfilled.

There is no need to wait for these moments --
these moments can become your natural life.

These extraordinary moments
can become ordinary moments --

that is the whole effort of Zen.

You can live an extraordinary life
in a very ordinary life:

cutting wood, chopping wood,
carrying water from the well,
you can be tremendously
at ease with yourself.

Cleaning the floor, cooking food,
washing the clothes,

you can be perfectly at ease --

because
the whole question is of
you doing your action

totally, enjoying, delighting in it.

~ Osho

THE UNTEACHABLE TEACHING....

"Truth cannot be taught…but it can be learned. And between these two sentences is the key of all understanding. So let me repeat: truth cannot be taught, but it can be learned – because truth is not a teaching, not a doctrine, not a theory, a philosophy, or something like that. Truth is existence. Truth is being. Nothing can be said about it.

"If you start saying something about it you will go round and round. You will beat around the bush, but you will never reach the center of it. Once you ask a question about you are already on the path of missing it. It can be encountered directly, but not through about. There is no via media. Truth is here and now. Only truth is. Nothing else exists."

There are many teachers, and there are many students. .....

Osho