Darshan 5 September 1979
[God is everywhere, except in the temple, Osho explains.]
Bliss is the only experience that gives you a taste of God. For a moment it transports you into another world where you are worldly no more; for a moment you are human no more, you are divine. The moment of bliss is the moment of God penetrating you and of you penetrating God; it is an orgasmic experience with God. Hence those who have not known it will think the blissful person mad. He looks utterly out of his mind; in a way he is, because he is beyond mind. In a way he is mad because he is so drunk with the divine. But his madness is far more valuable than the so-called worldly sanity.
The ordinary human being who thinks that he is normal is utterly wrong; he is not normal, he is only average. The blissful person, one who has known something of God, is not average but he is normal. He is natural, spontaneous.
Become blissful and God is not far away. Don't seek and search for him in the churches and in the temples; he is not there. Nobody has ever found God there. Jesus found him in the mountains, Moses found him in the mountains, Mahavira found him in the forest, Buddha found him under a tree - it has never been heard of that anybody has ever found him in a temple, in a church, in a mosque.
It has not happened, and it is not going to happen, because he is not there.
If anybody wants to escape from God, the best place is the temple, the church, the mosque. You can hide there and God will never be able to find you! Otherwise God is everywhere, spread all over; in every living thing, God is the life.
[To Jiwan Edith, on gratitude]
We prize things only if we have to make great effort to achieve them. The greater the effort, the higher is the prize in our minds.
Life comes as a gift from God, with no effort on our side, hence we go on missing its tremendous value. One becomes religious only when one becomes aware of the blessing that life is. Then each moment is precious. Then each moment is such a contentment that desires disappear of their own accord.
Desires can exist only in a discontented mind. If each moment of life becomes a contentment, a fulfillment, if each moment is joy, then desires disappear. The so-called saints teach that become desireless, then you will attain to bliss. I teach: Become blissful and you will become desireless.
Bliss has to be the first aim. Bliss is the beginning of sannyas.
From this moment start looking at life anew, with new eyes, as if you have been born again and for the first time you are seeing the trees and the stars and the mountains and the people... for the first time! And you will be surprised at how much you have missed in the past, how much is always available.
God goes on pouring gifts and we take them for granted. That is the attitude of the irreligious mind.
The moment you start feeling thankfulness, gratitude, you are religious - not by being a Christian or a Hindu, but by being grateful to God.
[Again the analogy of farming when talking of bliss]
Bliss is a crop: you have to grow it. You yourself have to become the soil. Your ego has to die, just as the seed dies in the soil. Once the seed dissolves itself into the soil a miracle happens: something that was unmanifest becomes manifest, something that was invisible becomes visible, the unknown comes into the world of the known.
In the seed it was not visible, in the sprout it is visible: the green leaves and the red flowers and the miracle is on the way... growth has started happening.
The seed was stagnant, the plant is a river. Bliss is a flower but you have to become the soil, and the ego has to die in the soil like the seed dies, then you can also know the invisible, then you can also manifest the unmanifested. That's what happens to a Jesus, to a Buddha, to a Lao Tzu: something of the unknown starts surrounding them, becomes their climate, their milieu. And those who are unprejudiced, those who are open, can see in a Buddha God walking on the earth, living in a body.
It is only the blind who miss, it is only the deaf who miss, but the greater part of humanity consists of blind and deaf people. Initiation into sannyas means that now you will search for the eyes and the ears. They are there, we just have not used them. Because they have not been functioning for a long long time, they are not working. If you start using them a little bit, slowly slowly blood circulates in them, slowly slowly life is revived, slowly slowly you start seeing, hearing, feeling - and these are the beginnings. The ultimate is when all these have happened to the maximum: you come to know being.
[Anand Rose, the fragrance of transcendence]
Bliss is a state of transcendence, transcendence of all duality: day and night, summer and winter, life and death, love and hate, good and bad, even God and the devil. When all duality has been transcended you fall in unity with existence. All separation disappears. There is no I and thou, there is only one, indivisible.
That state is bliss and that state is a state of flowering. You become a rose when you are blissful.
Before becoming blissful one is only a seed, and seeds are never beautiful. Seeds can't be beautiful, because seeds are only shells, protective shells, and the reality is hidden behind. The reality is not yet manifest. The right soil, the right climate is needed for the seed to be transformed and become a flower.
Every man is born as a seed and every man carries the potential to become a rose. The color of sannyas is the color of roses, it is the color of blossoming. In the East orange represents the color of spring... when all the flowers bloom, and bloom so abundantly.
By becoming a sannyasin you are moving into the world in a totally different dimension, in a commune of people whose whole effort is to be transformed from seeds into flowers. You are entering into a great pilgrimage. It has a beginning but it has no end. The rose goes on opening, goes on opening; there is no end to that opening.
[To build the temple of peace you need love as a foundation]
You can be a man of peace only through love. If without love one tries to be a man of peace, the peace will be false, pseudo, a pretension. It will not even be skin-deep. If you scratch such a man of peace, immediately violence will arise. He will only be polite, he will only be peaceful because it pays to be peaceful.
People like these have created proverbs like "Honesty is the best policy" - even honesty becomes policy in their hands, honesty becomes politics in their hands. Even honesty becomes ugly. Hence before one can really be a man of peace one has to grow love in one's heart. When the flame of love burns bright in the heart your whole being radiates peace. Then there is no way to provoke you into violence - no way.
Jesus is crucified and his last prayer is "God, forgive these people because they don't know what they are doing." He is a man of peace, but his peace is coming from his love. Love is the root and peace is the flower. Love is hidden underground. People will see only the peace, but without the roots of love, you can only have a plastic flower... And never be satisfied with plastic flowers, because you cannot carry plastic flowers with you beyond death. But real flowers can be carried with you; their fragrance will go with you, their fragrance is eternal. Even death cannot destroy it.
[Rebelling against the mind brings clarity of consciousness]
Only rebellion is capable of bringing purity: rebellion against all that is dead and past, rebellion against the established, rebellion against the vested interests of the politicians and the priests, rebellion against your own mind, because your mind is in the service of the established order of things.
You have to rebel in a thousand and one ways so that anything that has been imposed upon you from the outside is thrown out. Once you have thrown out all the furniture that has been forced upon you, all the baggage of the mind, great purity arises in you, great cleanliness, great clarity. And God can descend only in that purity, that clarity, that cleanliness.
Become a temple! There is no other way to attain purity. So many people try to become pure but without removing all the nonsense that they are carrying inside; so at the most they can whitewash themselves on the surface.
Jesus calls these people "whitewashed sepulchres", corpses, whitewashed, but there is no spirit in them; without rebellion there can be no spirit. Rebellion brings spirit in you, makes you alert, aware, makes you more conscious.
[Anand Dhiraj - Bliss needs patience... ]
One cannot predict when it will come. Only one thing can be said categorically, that if you are impatient it will not come. The more impatient you are for it, the less is the possibility, and if you are patient, it is bound to come. The more patient you are, the closer it is. If your patience is absolute, then it can happen right this very moment. But everything depends on patience. Patience is prayer and patience is trust and patience is love.
Bliss is the ultimate law of life. If we remain attuned to the ultimate law of life, there is bliss, there is paradise. If we fall out of tune, there is misery, there is hell.
There is no God as a person who punishes people or rewards them; that whole idea is anthropocentric, juvenile, childish. God is not a person but the ultimate law that binds and keeps everything together. It is man's privilege to be with it or not to be with it. Trees cannot choose, hence they are always blissful, animals cannot choose, hence they are always blissful, but their blissfulness is unconscious because they can't choose. With consciousness comes choice. It is only man who can choose, either to be with the law or to be against the law. If you are with the law you are blissful; if you are against the law you fall into misery and hell. It is all up to you. And because it is all up to us, there is great hope.
Sannyas is the beginning of that hope, of that choice. All that I am doing here is helping you to feel the ultimate law of life so that you can be in tune with it. A moment comes when you are so attuned, the moment of at-one-ment, that there is no separation, not at all; you are almost merged, you have become one with the law. Then we call that man a Buddha, a Christ - one who has become one with the law, absolutely one.
[Bliss and consciousness are inseparably linked together]
Once this has been understood things become very easy. Then you know, whenever you are unconscious, you create misery, and whenever you are conscious, you create bliss; the key is in your hands and you can open the lock or you can close the door.
Consciousness has to be your work. The whole of life has to be devoted to becoming more conscious; that's what meditation is all about. All meditations lead to the same goal: consciousness.
And consciousness brings bliss.
[To Svadadharma: bliss is the very axis of your existence, an explosion from within.]
Nobody can give it to you and nobody can take it away, because it is your self-nature. And you need not go to Jerusalem or to Kashi or to the Himalayas, in search of it. The only place you have to go is in. It is found not by looking out, it is found by looking in, it is an inward journey. hence the art of meditation: it is nothing but how to look in, devices to bring you from your outer wanderings, to stop the outer wanderings, to stop the mind from its continuous extrovert occupations, so that a turning in can happen.
Once it has happened then things become very t easy. Once you have known that the treasure is within F then it is not very difficult to enter the same space t again and again. Only the first time is it difficult, and the difficulty arises because the mind is accustomed too much to going out. It only knows how to go out, it knows nothing of the inner, it has completely forgotten its own center.