by Osho
Share your being if you have nothing. And that is the greatest wealth—everybody is born with it. Share your being! Stretch out your hand, move towards the other with love in the heart. Don’t think anybody is a stranger. Nobody is. Or, everybody is. If you share, nobody is. If you don’t share, everybody is.
You may be a very rich man but a miser, a non-sharing one. Then your own children are strangers, then your own wife is a stranger—because how can you really meet a miserly man? He is closed. He is already dead in his grave. How can you move towards a miserly man? If you move, he escapes. He is always afraid, because whenever somebody comes close, sharing starts. Even shaking hands a miserly man feels is dangerous, because who knows?—friendship may grow out of it, and then there is danger.
A miserly man is always alert, on guard, not to allow anybody too close. He keeps everybody at a distance. A smile is dangerous because it breaks distances. If you smile at a beggar on the road, the distance is bridged. He is no more a beggar, he has become a friend. Now, if he is hungry, you will have to do something. It is better to go on without smiling. It is safe, more economical, less dangerous—no risk in it.
It is not a question of sharing something. It is a question of simple sharing—whatsoever you have! If you don’t have anything else, you have a warm body—you can sit close with somebody and give your warmth. You can smile, you can dance, you can sing; you can laugh, and help the other to laugh.
5 of Rainbows: The Outsider
The moment you enter to the center of your being, you are no longer an outsider.
For the first time you are the insider.
Everybody is an outsider; howsoever you pretend, you remain an outsider. Unless one enters into the whole, one remains an outsider. We pretend, we try to create a small oasis of relationship—friends, relatives, children, husband, wife—and we try to hide behind these things. But death comes and destroys all, and suddenly we are naked in our outsiderness.
No, in this world you cannot be an insider unless you have moved into the whole. This world belongs to the whole. Only by belonging to the whole do you become part of this existence—otherwise not. These trees will remain strangers to you and so will the birds and the sun and the moon and the sands and the rains. Everything will remain a stranger unless you have made a contact with the divine. With that contact the whole quality of life changes.
Not to belong is one of the greatest experiences of life. To be utterly an outsider, never feeling to be a part anywhere, is a great experience of transcendence.
An American tourist went to see a Sufi Master. For many years he had heard about him, had fallen in deep love with his words, his message. Finally he decided to go to see him. When he entered his room he was surprised—it was an utterly empty room! The Master was sitting; there was no furniture at all! The American could not conceive of a living space without any furniture. He immediately asked, “Where is your furniture, sir?”
And the old Sufi laughed and he said, “And where is yours?”
And the American said, “Of course I am a tourist here. I cannot go on carrying my furniture!”
And the old man said, “So amI a tourist for only just a few days, and then I will be gone, just as you will be gone.”
This world is just a pilgrimage—of great significance, but not a place to belong to, not a place to become part of. To be an insider in this world is to get lost. The worldly is the insider; a buddha is bound to remain an outsider. All buddhas are outsiders. Even if they are in the crowd they are alone. Even if they are in the marketplace they are not there. Even if they relate they remain separate. There is a kind of subtle distance that is always there.
And that distance is freedom, that distance is great joy, that distance is your own space. Do you call yourself a loner? You must be comparing yourself with others: “They are having so many relationships, they are having love affairs. They belong to each other, they are insiders—and I am a loner. Why?” You must be creating anguish unnecessarily.
My approach always is: whatsoever existence has given to you must be a subtle necessity of your soul, otherwise it would not have been given in the first place.
Think more of aloneness. Celebrate aloneness, celebrate your pure space, and great song will arise in your heart. And it will be a song of awareness, it will be a song of meditation. It will be a song of an alone bird calling in the distance—not calling to somebody in particular, but just calling because the heart is full and wants to call, because the cloud is full and wants to rain, because the flower is full and the petals open and the fragrance is released … unaddressed. Let your aloneness become a dance.
6 of Rainbows: Compromise
Compromise is ugly … . How can truth compromise with lies?
Religions cannot exist without the devil. They need a God and they need a devil also. So do not be misguided if you see only a God in their temples. Just behind that God the devil is hiding, because no religion can exist without the devil.
Something has to be condemned, something has to be fought, something has to be destroyed. The total is not accepted, only part. This is very basic. You are not accepted totally by any religion, only partially. They say, “We accept your love, but not your hate. Destroy hate.” And this is a very deep problem, because when you destroy hate completely love is also destroyed—because they are not two. They say, “We accept your silence, but we do not accept your anger.” Destroy anger and your aliveness is destroyed. Then you will be silent, but not an alive man—only a dead one. That silence is not life, it is just death.
Religions always divide you into two: the evil and the divine. They accept the divine and are against the evil—the evil has to be destroyed. So if someone really follows them, he will come to conclude that the moment you destroy the devil, God is destroyed. But no one really follows them—no one can follow them because the very teaching is absurd. So what is everyone doing? Everyone is just deceiving. That is why there is so much hypocrisy. That hypocrisy has been created by religion. You cannot do whatsoever they are teaching you to do, so you become a hypocrite. If you follow them you will die; if you do not follow them you feel guilty that you are irreligious. So what to do?
The cunning mind makes a compromise. It goes on paying lip service to them, saying, “I am following you,” but it goes on doing whatsoever it wants to do. You continue your anger, you continue your sex, you continue your greed, but you go on saying that greed is bad, anger is bad, sex is bad—it is a sin.
This is hypocrisy. The whole world has become hypocritical, nobody is honest. Unless these divisive religions disappear, nobody can be honest. This will look contradictory because all the religions are teaching to be honest, but they are the foundation stones of all dishonesty. They make you dishonest; because they teach you to do impossible things, which you cannot do, you become hypocrites.
You have to create your own path to your own temple. No help is possible, and it is the grandeur of humanity, a tremendous dignity, that you can follow only your own path.
All religions are leading people wrongly; they are destroying people, making them into sheep. An authentic religion will make a man into a lion who walks alone, who never walks in a crowd. The crowd never suits him, because with the crowd you have always to compromise. With the crowd you have always to listen to others: their criticism, their appraisal, their conceptions of right and wrong, their values of good and bad.
In the crowd you cannot remain natural. The crowd is a very unnatural environment. Unless you are very aware, the crowd is going to crush you into dust. It is because of this that you don’t find many buddhas in the world. A buddha has to fight inch by inch for his individuality. He has not to give way to the crowd, whatever the cost. Unless such an uncompromising attitude remains constantly in you, you cannot remain unaffected by the crowd in which you live.
And unfortunately everybody is born in a crowd—the parents, the teachers, the neighbors. Nobody is fortunate enough to be born alone, so that is out of the
question. You are born in the society, in the crowd. Unless you can keep your intelligence clean of the pollution that will be surrounding you from every side, sooner or later you will become somebody else, somebody who nature had never intended you to be.
Remember constantly that you have your own destiny, just as everybody else has his own destiny. Unless you become the flower, the seeds of which you have been carrying within you, you will not feel blissfulness, fulfillment, contentment, you will not be able to dance in the wind, in the rain, in the sun. You can be in paradise only as an individual, if you have followed the path that you create by walking. There are no ready-made pathways.
When you enter in, you enter into pure space—not a road; there are not even footprints. Buddha used to say that the inner world is just like the sky. The birds fly but they don’t leave their footprints. Nobody can follow their footprints because in the sky their footprints are not; as they have flown away, their footprints have dissolved.
The inner sky remains always pure, just waiting for you, because nobody can get inside you.
7 of Rainbows: Patience
When people start working towards the inner, impatience is the greatest barrier. Infinite patience is needed. It can happen the next moment, but infinite patience is needed.
There is one Zen saying which says, “Hurry slowly.” That’s right! Hurry, that’s right, because you are going to die—in that sense hurry. But inside, if you are in too much of a hurry, you will miss, because you will conclude too soon, before your eyes have become attuned. Don’t conclude too soon.
Hurry slowly. Just wait! Go there and sit and wait. By and by, a new world of the invisible becomes clear, comes to you. You become attuned to it, then you can hear the harmony, the melody; the silence starts its own music. It is always there, but it is so silent that very trained ears are needed. It is not like a noise, it is like silence. The sound within is like silence, the form within is like the formless. There is no time and no space within, and all that you know is either in space or in time. Things are in space, events are in time, and now physicists say these two things are not two; even time is just a fourth dimension of space.
You know only time and space, the world of things and events. You don’t know the world of the witnessing self. It is beyond both, it is not confined to any space and it is not confined to any time. There is duration without time, there is space but without any height, length, breadth—it is a totally different world. You will need to become attuned to it, so don’t be impatient—impatience is the greatest barrier. I have come to feel that when people start working towards the inner, impatience is the greatest barrier. Infinite patience is needed. It can happen the next moment, but infinite patience is needed.
If you are impatient it may not happen for lives, because the very impatience will not allow you the repose that Jesus talks about, the tranquillity. Even if you are expecting, that will be a disturbance. If you are thinking something is going to happen, something extraordinary, then nothing will happen. If you are waiting, expecting that some enlightenment is going to happen, you will miss it. Don’t expect. All expectations belong to the world of death, the dimension of time and space.
No goal belongs to the inner. There is no way to it except by waiting, infinite patience. Jesus has said, “Watch and be patient.” And one day, suddenly you are illumined. One day, when the right tuning happens, when you are ready, suddenly you are illumined. All darkness disappears, you are filled with life, eternal life, which never dies.
Patience is very alert, patience is very active, patience is very expectant. If you are waiting for somebody—a friend is to call—you may be sitting just by the door, but you are very attentive, alert. Any noise on the road, any car passing by, and immediately you start looking: maybe the friend has come? The wind on your doors, and suddenly you are alert: maybe he has knocked … . Dead leaves in the garden moving hither and thither, and you come out of your home; maybe he has come … . Patience is as active as that. It is a waiting. It is not dull, it is very radiant. It is not unconscious; it is not like a stupor. It is like a flame burning bright. One waits. One can wait infinitely, but one waits, expectant, active, alert, watchful.
You cannot force things to happen before their time. The spring will come and the flowers will blossom, but you cannot force the spring. The rain will come, the clouds will cover the sky, the whole thirst of the earth will be gone—but you cannot force it, you have to be patient.
And this is the beauty, that the more patient you are, the quicker is the coming of the spring. If you can be absolutely patient, this very moment spring can come.
Your urgency is creating a trouble for you because it is making you more and more confused, more and more restless, in a hurry. I can understand; the whole Western tradition has taught you only one thing, and that is speed.
Everybody is trying to become rich as quickly as possible, and naturally if you want to be rich quickly you have to find some immoral means—maybe heroin money. All the Western religious leaders are against drugs, but they don’t understand that the idea of speed, that everybody has to be fast enough … and millions are competing for the same place; naturally there is competition, there is jealousy, there is violence. It does not matter, means don’t matter; the end is to reach quickly—either to a powerful position, or to become world famous, or to have all the riches possible.
But trees don’t grow impatiently. They move with a grace, with patience, with trust. There is no hurry anywhere else except in your mind. If you really want to be in a state of peace and joy, you will have to unlearn your old habit for achieving things quickly, fast.
Urgency naturally creates the question: “How?” If speed is needed, then the technology is needed. “How” means technology. Meditation is not a by-product of any technology. It does not need any technology. It does not need any “how.” It simply needs now.
8 of Rainbows: Ordinariness
The discovered self knows nothing of the abnormal, perverted, neurotic mind.
It becomes simple, it becomes ordinary, but that ordinariness is luminous.
I have heard:
A king and the high priest of the country were both praying early in the morning. It was still dark and they could not see in the temple. The king was saying, “My God, I am just dust under your feet. I am nobody. Have mercy on me!” And the priest said almost the same, maybe in different words but the same thing, “I am nobody. Have mercy on us!”
And then they both heard, with surprise, a third voice. By that time it was becoming a little light and they could see—the poorest beggar of the town was also praying and he was saying, “God, I am dust under your feet. I am nobody. Have mercy on us!”
The king blinked his eyes, turned towards the priest, and said, “Look who is saying that he is just ordinary, that he is nobody. Just look! Who is saying, ‘I am nobody’? Just a beggar! The king can say, ‘I am nobody,’ the high priest can say, ‘I am nobody,’ but a beggar? How egoistic! How pretentious!”
They both laughed at the idea of the beggar trying to be just like the king or the high priest. He was also bragging about being nobody. The king and the priest thought it insulting. Of course, they can say they are nobody, because everybody knows they are not. Even God knows they are not! They are just being humble. But this poor beggar—what humility is there? He is certainly nobody, and he is saying, “I am nobody.” What is the point of saying it?
Remember, your so-called saints have tried to be humble before God, but just in order to be higher in the eyes of people. But my idea of a religious man is that he does not even claim ordinariness—he claims not. He is simply ordinary, whatsoever he is.
A Zen Master, Rinzai, was asked, “What did you do before you were enlightened?”
He said, “I used to chop wood and carry water from the well.”
And the man asked, “Now, now that you are enlightened, what do you do?”
He said, “The same thing—chopping wood and carrying wate
r from the well.”
The man was puzzled. He said, “I cannot understand. Then what is the difference? Then what is the point of becoming enlightened? Before you used to chop wood and carry water, now you continue the same thing. Then what is the difference?”
And Rinzai laughed. He said, “The difference is: before I was doing it because I had to do it, it was a duty. Now it is a joy. The quality has changed—the work is the same.”
The small things of life have to be transformed by your inner transformation. This I call the religious quality; everything becomes sacred. Taking a bath, making love, eating food, going to sleep—everything becomes sacred.
Common sense is very rare because to be ordinary … the ego prevents you. It wants you to be extraordinary, to be special, to be a V.V.I.P. It does not allow you to be ordinary, simple, nobody, a nothingness—which is your real nature. In that ordinariness, in that nobodiness, is your real home. Outside it is only misery, suffering, death, anguish, angst. Settling in your simple innocence, knowing nothing … just being, and you have become an emperor without any empire. No anxiety of the empire at all, just a pure emperor.
This pure essence of your being is called the buddha, the awakened, the enlightened one. There is no other dance and no other joy. There is no other poetry, there is no other music which can go higher, deeper, which can be without limits, than the joy of an awakened being. It is your birthright.