by Osho
I will not believe or disbelieve. I will not be a Catholic or a communist, I will not be a Hindu or a Mohammedan. I will simply not follow any ideology.” Because whomever you follow, you will be gathering dust around yourself.
Just drop all knowledge. It hurts because you have carried that knowledge for so long and you have been bragging so much about that knowledge—your degrees, M.A.s and Ph.Ds, and you have been bragging about all those degrees. And suddenly I am saying to drop all that nonsense?
Just be as simple as a child. Just be again a child as you were born, as you came into this world. In that mirrorlike state you will be able to reflect that which is. Innocence is the door to knowing. Knowledge is the barrier and innocence is the bridge.
XX. Beyond Illusion
It takes a little effort to get out of illusions because we have invested in them very much. They are our hopes: It is through them that we go on living.
The mind lives in illusions. The mind is nothing but all the illusions accumulated in you: illusions as memories, illusions as imagination, illusions as dreams, hopes, desires. And in the very center of all these illusions is the illusion of “I am”—the ego. That is the very root, the central illusion, and all other illusions move around it. They support it, they feed it, they are supported by it and they are fed by it; it is a mutual arrangement. And between these two, you and your reality are utterly lost.
Meditation simply means getting out of this illusory state—of dreams, desires, past, future—and just being in the moment that surrounds you. Just to be utterly in the moment, with no thought, is to be in reality. It takes a little effort to drop out of the illusions because we have lived in those illusions for so long; it has become almost habitual, a second nature. It also takes a little effort to get out of those illusions because we have invested in them very much. They are our hopes: it is through them that we go on living, prolonging. To drop them means to drop the future, to drop all hopes; and we don’t know how to live in the present without hope.
That is the whole art: to live in the present and without hope. And remember, living without hope does not mean living hopelessly. Living without hope simply means that the present is so tremendously beautiful, who cares about the future? Who bothers about it? Not that one is living in despair and hopelessness, but that one is so fulfilled in the present that there is no space left to think about the future.
The person who lives in hopelessness lives an empty life. He does not know what the present is, and the future has disappeared. He was only living for the future, the carrot that goes on hanging there—“tomorrow”—and never arrives. One goes on working hard to catch the carrot. Because it is never caught, one goes on running after it. Ultimately death takes you, and still you have not arrived. This is the story of millions of people. They live in hope without any fulfillment ever, and they die unfulfilled.
To live without hope simply means to live here, now, knowing that there is no tomorrow; it is always today. Then a totally different kind of life starts getting crystallized in you. It is so utterly joyous that one does not think of the past and one does not think of the future.
We think of the past and the future only because the present is very empty, because we don’t know how to live this moment. So either we run towards the past or we run towards the future, which is in a way the same. The past is no more, the future is not yet; both are nothings. Between these two nothings is this moment, and this moment is all.
The effort that we have been making in the East down through the centuries, is not to solve problems. For example, in your nightmare you try to solve the problem of what to do with this lion that is following you. That’s what psychoanalysis is. Or you start trying to find out where it comes from, how it happened in the first place—“Why is this lion following me? And from where is this fear coming? And why am I climbing the tree?” And you meet somebody who is very expert in analyzing things, in explaining, in creating theories, in telling you how it happened in the first place. Maybe it is a birth trauma or maybe your parents have not treated you well. Or maybe this lion is somebody. Just look directly into its eyes—it is your wife or your husband, and you are afraid of your wife or your husband.
But all these explanations take one thing for granted—that it is real. And that is the basic problem, not where the lion has come from or what the symbolic meaning of the lion is. That is not the real problem. The real problem is whether or not the lion is real. Psychoanalysis does not help you to become aware that mind is an unreal thing—illusion, maya. In fact, it takes you more into the mud and the mire. It takes you deeper, to the roots. But an illusion cannot have any roots. You will always be getting to the roots but you will not arrive. An illusion cannot have any cause.
Now let me repeat it, because this will make the difference very clear. An illusion cannot have any cause, so you cannot search for the cause. You can go on and on, you can go into the unconscious of man … Freud did that, and did it perfectly, but that didn’t solve anything. Jung had to go deeper. He had to find something like the collective unconscious. And you can go on. Then you can find the universal unconscious, and so on, so forth, layer upon layer. You can go on analyzing—that maybe it is a birth trauma, that you became very much afraid when you came out of the birth canal from your mother’s womb. But things don’t end there, because you were in your mother’s womb for nine months. Those nine months cannot be simply dropped. In those nine months much happened to you. You have to go into analyzing that.
And if you go deep enough you will have to enter into your previous life—that’s what Hindu analysts have done. They say “previous life,” and then “previous to previous,” and go on and on backwards. And you reach nowhere. Either way you come to a point where you see the whole futility of it.
To see the futility of the mind and to see that an illusion cannot have any cause and cannot be analyzed, the only thing that can be done is to make yourself a little bit alert, aware—in that very awareness the dream disappears. It has no grip over you. And once the mind is not there gripping you, you are a totally new person. A new consciousness is born in you.
XXI. Completion
Remember one basic law: anything that is complete drops, because then there is no meaning in carrying it; anything that is incomplete clings, it waits for its completion.
And this existence is really always longing for completion.
The whole existence has a basic tendency to complete everything. It does not like incomplete things—they hang, they wait; and there is no hurry for existence—they can wait for millions of years.
Do you remember anything that you have completed? Do you have any moment in your life, any experience, which you can say is complete, total? If you have any experience that is complete, the mind will never go back to it. There is no need. There is no need! It is absolutely useless. The mind simply tries to complete everything. The mind has a tendency to complete. And this is necessary; otherwise life will be impossible.
So the constant monologue that everybody carries within is really a part of wrong living—incomplete living. Nothing is finished, and you go on making new beginnings. Then the mind goes on becoming piled up with incomplete things. They will never be completed, but they will create a burden on the mind—a constant burden, a growing burden, an increasing burden—and that creates the monologue.
That is why the older you grow, the more the monologue grows with you. And old men begin to talk aloud. Really, the burden is so great that the control is lost. So look at old men. They will be sitting, and their legs will be working, and they will be talking, and they will be making gestures. What are they doing? You think they have gone crazy, that they are old and now they have become senile. No, that is not the case. They have had a long, incomplete life, and now death is coming nearer and mind is in haste, trying to complete everything. And it seems impossible!
So if you really want to break this monologue, which means silence, then try to complete everything that you are
doing. And do not start new things—you will go crazy. Finish whatever you are doing, all the very small things.
You are taking a bath: Make it complete. How to make it complete? Be there! Your presence will do it. Be there, enjoy it, live it, feel it. Be sensitive to the water falling on you, be saturated. Come out of your bath doing it completely, totally. Otherwise the bath will follow you. It will become a shadow; it will go with you. You are eating—then eat! Then forget everything else; then let nothing exist in the world except your present act.
Whatever you are doing, do it so completely, so unhurriedly, so patiently that the mind is saturated and becomes content. Only then leave it. Three months of continuous awareness about doing each of your acts completely will give you some intervals in your monologue. Then, for the first time, you will become aware that the internal monologue is a by-product of incomplete living.
Buddha has used the term “right living.” He has given an eight-fold path. In those eight principles, one is “right living.” Right living means total living; wrong living means incomplete living.
If you are angry, then be really angry. Be authentically angry; make it complete. Suffer it! There is no harm in suffering because suffering brings much wisdom. There is no harm in suffering because only through suffering does one transcend it. Suffer it! But be authentically angry.
What are you doing? You are angry and you are smiling. Now the anger will follow you. You can deceive the whole world but you cannot deceive yourself, you cannot deceive your mind. The mind knows very well that the smile is false. Now anger will continue inside; that will become a monologue. Then whatever you have not said aloud, you will have to say within. Whatsoever you have not done, you will imagine doing. Now you will create a dream. You will fight with your enemy, with the object of your anger. The mind is trying to help you to complete a certain thing. But that too is impossible because you are doing other things.
Even this can be helpful: Close your room—you were not angry; the situation was such that you could not be—close your room and now be angry. But do not continue the monologue. Act it out! There is no necessity to act it out on a person, a pillow will do. Fight with the pillow, act out your anger, express it—but let it be authentic, real. Let it be real, and then you will feel a sudden relaxation inside. Then the monologue will drop, it will break. There will be an interval, a gap. That gap is silence.
So the first thing is to break the monologue. And you can do it only if your living becomes a “right living,” a complete living. Never be incomplete. Live every moment as if there is no other moment to come. Then only will you complete it. Know that death can occur at any moment; this may be the last. Feel that, “If I have to do something, I must do it here and now, completely!”
The Master
Once you have seen a buddha, an enlightened one, a tremendous flame suddenly starts blossoming in you. “If this beauty, this grace, this wisdom, this blissfulness can happen to any man, then why can it not happen to me?”
The master is nothing but a challenge: “If it has happened to me, it can happen to you.” And the authentic master—there are so many teachers propounding doctrines, beliefs, philosophies—the authentic master is not concerned with words. He is not concerned with beliefs, atheism or theism, is not concerned even with God or heaven and hell. The authentic master is concerned only with one single thing—to provoke you to see your potentiality, to see inward. His presence makes you silent, his words deepen your silence, his very being slowly starts melting your falseness, your mask, your personality.
The master’s function is to give you a taste of insecurity, to give you a taste of openness. And once you know that openness, that insecurity … . They are basic ingredients of freedom. Without them you cannot open your wings and fly in the sky of infinity.
It is absolutely essential to avoid the teachers; they are fake masters. It is very difficult, because they speak the same language. So you have not to listen to the words, you have to listen to the heart. You have not to listen to their doctrines, their logic and arguments, you have to listen to their grace, their beauty, their eyes. You have to listen to and feel the aura that surrounds a master. Just like a cool breeze it touches you. Once you have found a master, you have found a key to open the treasure of your potentialities.
To find a master is easy if you are available not only to words but to silences too; not only to words, because the truth never comes through words, but between the words, between the lines, in the silent spaces. If you are searching for a master, don’t carry any criterion, any prejudice. Be absolutely available, so that when you come across a master you can feel his energy. He carries a whole world of energy around him. His own experience radiates all around him. If you are open and not afraid of experiencing a new thing, of tasting something original, it is not very difficult to find a master. What difficulty there is, is on your side.
The master is your future: that which you can become he has become. The master is nothing but your own unfoldment: you are a seed, he is a flower. Let the master become an invitation to you—the invitation for the inner spring, the invitation for the inner flower. The possibility is there, and unless that possibility becomes actual you will never be satisfied. Unless a person becomes a god there is no benediction, no bliss. And each person is a potential god, and the whole of life is a task to transform the potential into the actual.
THE SUIT OF FIRE (WANDS)
Energy—Action—Response
William Blake is right when he says, “Energy is delight.” That’s a very profound statement. Yes, energy is delight, and the greater the energy you have the greater will be your delight. Overflowing energy becomes celebration. When the energy is dancing in you, in unison, in a deep harmony, in rhythm and flow, you become a blessing to the world.
Energy
Life is a tremendous energy phenomenon. You are not aware of how much energy you have. Do you think atoms know how much energy they have? A single atom, which is invisible to the eyes, if it explodes, can destroy a city as big as Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Within minutes everything is burned. If an atom of matter has that much energy, just think—your consciousness is a far higher phenomenon. Your being must be carrying universes of energies—dormant, of course, because you are not aware. But those who have become aware, their descriptions give an indication.
Kabir says that in his experience of inner being, it is as if thousands of suns have suddenly arisen. All around him suns are dancing; the light is so dazzling that it makes him almost blind. But this is not only Kabir’s experience. Many mystics have described it the same way.
But don’t be worried; this energy is creative, not destructive. Any energy that comes out of meditative silence is creative. There is not a single instance of it destroying anything; it has only created. It has created a beautiful space within, and it has created beautiful art, music, sculpture, poetry, painting, outside. This fire is not even hot, it is very cool.
For example, the story of Moses—he went to Mount Sinai in search of God and he saw a fire, and within the fire a green bush, unburned. He could not believe his eyes. The flames were rising high and the bush inside the flames was green, and its flowers were blossoming as if a cool breeze was passing through, not a fire.
Theologians have been trying to figure it out. I am not a theologian, but I can understand a little bit of poetry and I think it is a poetic statement, not a theological statement. What is being said is that life is a cool energy, so creative, so non-destructive, that even within its fire, a bush will remain green and will grow and blossom.
Accept this life energy—create a communion with this life energy, a dialogue, and you will be immensely enriched, not burned. For the first time your spring will come and your flowers will blossom.
Rejoice with the flames of the energy, dance with those flames, have a communion with those flames and you will be finding a dialogue with existence itself. If you are afraid that you may be burned, then this very fear will stop the p
rocess, will become a barrier to entering inward into deeper realms of your consciousness. Drop this fear. Nobody has ever been burned by life energy.
One has to learn to drop fear as one enters inward—because there is nobody except your own energy, and your own energy cannot be your enemy. In fact even to say “your energy” is not right. It is because of the poverty of language that we have to use expressions like that. It is better to say you are the energy. Who is there to be burned? You are the fire itself, those dancing flames are your very being.
Action
Mind always thinks in terms of purpose, profit, utility. When the mind disappears, action does not disappear, activity disappears—and there is a great difference between the two. Activity has utility; action is pure joy, pure beauty. You act not because something has to be achieved; you act because action is a dance, is a song. You act because you are so full of energy.
Have you watched a child running on the sea beach? You ask him, “Why are you running? What is the purpose of your running? What are you going to gain out of it?” Have you watched the child collecting seashells on the beach? You ask him, “What is the utility of it all? You can use your time in a more utilitarian way. Why waste your time?”
The child is not concerned about utility at all; he is enjoying his energy. He is so full of energy, so bubbling with energy that it is a sheer dance—any excuse will do. These are just excuses—seashells, pebbles, colored stones. These are just excuses—the sun, the beautiful beach … just excuses to run and to jump and to shout with joy. There is no utility at all.