Darshan 24 September 1979

[Osho gives sannyas to two boys and addresses the parents]

Anand Binghi: bliss brother... Anand means bliss, and that has to become his education. Help him to be more and more blissful; avoid anything that creates misery. If we are a little more conscious, ninety percent of misery-creating patterns can be avoided by children. But because we are not conscious, we go on perpetuating the same patterns that make us miserable, that have made our parents miserable and their parents, back to Adam and Eve. The same patterns go on being imposed on the new generations, and of course, it is very accumulative. We have come to the final peak of misery: either man is to commit suicide or to take a quantum leap out of all the patterns that the past has created.

To be a mother, to really be a mother, means not to impart any misery-creating pattern. One has to be very conscious.

Help him to be blissful, help him to be cheerful. You can help only if you are blissful and you are cheerful. Don't give him seriousness about anything, let him be playful. Children naturally are. We destroy their playfulness: we make them serious and somber.

Don't destroy all his disobedience. Yes, part of it, which is destructive to him has to be destroyed, but only a part, a very small fragment. The criterion is that it should not be destructive to him, that's all. If it is not destructive to him, help him to be disobedient, because it is through disobedience that he will become an individual. It is not obedience that is going to give him a soul, it is disobedience.

Disobedience has something tremendously religious about it, because it is rebellion.

It is inconvenient for you - that I understand - and parents look to their own convenience, for their own comfort. It is comfortable if the child is obedient, he creates no nuisance for you, but he is dying,

his spirit is being killed. If he is obedient to you, he will be obedient to the boss in the office, he will be obedient to the teacher in the school, he will be obedient to all authority figures: to the priest, to the politician, to the policeman. And then for the whole of his life he will function as a slave.

That is too much just for your convenience, so even if it is inconvenient sometimes, help him to be disobedient. He will never be able to obey anything which is against his conscience - and that is the greatest gift you can give to him. He will obey, but he will obey according to his light and he will disobey according to his light. His obedience and disobedience will be secondary to his own conscience. And once a child has been given his own conscience, you have put him on the right track to God.

Anand means bliss and troels is a form of Thor, the god of thunder... So Anand Troels will mean god of bliss and thunder.

Bliss comes like thunder. When it comes, it always comes in an overwhelming way. And you cannot hide it: it is so explosive, it is like an atomic explosion. You cannot keep it for yourself, you have to share it. Out of sheer necessity it has to be shared: it is too much and you cannot contain it. To contain it becomes painful, to share it becomes a relief.

Remember, yes, even bliss can be painful if it is too much, it can become almost intolerable. It can give you an aching heart, as if the heart is going to burst. It has to be shared, and sharing means love. If love means anything it means sharing: sharing your joy, sharing your song, sharing your life, sharing whatsoever you have.

And treat him as a god - every person should be treated as a god, because nobody is less than that.

Not only human beings, but animals and birds and trees, they should all be treated as gods. I am a pagan: I believe in the divinity of the whole. God is not something separate from his existence; he is spread all over the space, he is everywhere. That's why you cannot find him so easily, because he is everywhere. If he was only somewhere, we would have found him long before now. We would have made a superhighway to his place and there would have been a railway station and an international airport and everything!

But we cannot find him because he is everywhere, he cannot be pinpointed. He is not in the church, in the temple, in the mosque: he is every where. He is not in any image: all images are his.

Treat him as a god, and if you treat him as a god he will learn how to treat others as gods - and that's what religion is all about, particularly my religion.

When you are industrious you are functioning as a body-mind mechanism. When you are utterly relaxed you are functioning as a spirit - no more body, no more mind - because the body can work, the mind can work. They know how to work, they are biological machines.

The mind goes on working twenty-four hours a day. Even though the work is not needed, even in sleep it goes on working. That is the only way it knows how to be: functioning continuously is its very core, very substance. And so is the case with the body: the body also continuously works.

Even when you are lying down and resting, the body is doing a thousand and one things: the food is being digested, the dead cells are being thrown out of the body, the breathing continues, the blood is being purified; millions of processes really are continuously there. Since the conception in the mother's womb till the grave, the body continues to work. And the case is the same, more or less, with the mind.

I am not against work. Work is beautiful if you know something which is beyond work, if you know something which comes only when you are in a state of no-effort. In the state of no-effort the beyond descends into you. Slowly slowly it sinks in you, goes to your very center: you are in communion with God.

This communion is real meditation. Meditation cannot be attained through any effort, but only through effortlessness.

The West has completely forgotten the ways of being effortless. It knows how to work, how to produce, it knows how to become: it has completely forgotten the language of being. Becoming is understandable, being is simply incomprehensible. The same is happening in the East unfortunately:

the East is turning West. It is learning the ways of the West, naturally, because the West has become rich, affluent; it has all kinds of gadgets. The East is very jealous and poor and suffering; it wants to have all the money that the West has, and all the mechanisms and all the technology. So even in the East the man who works hard, is industrious, is now being praised.

In fact for a Buddha to exist is becoming more and more impossible. In Russia one cannot become a Buddha - the communist party won't allow that much rest. He will be thought anti-communist, bourgeois, dangerous to the society. Meditation is not allowed. There are a few people who are interested in me in Russia, but they have to listen to my tapes while hiding themselves so that nobody should come to know. They read my books but those books are moving underground.

Just two days before, I received a letter: twenty-five persons want to become sannyasins; a whole group in a town has become involved with me. They have made their own malas, their own lockets, but they cannot wear them, they are hiding their malas... It has become almost impossible in Russia to talk about meditation. What to say about being a Buddha?

And the whole art of meditation is the art of remaining effortless, of being so quiet, so tranquil, so relaxed, that there is not even a ripple. Your consciousness is a completely silent lake, and in that silent lake the whole sky is reflected, with all the stars, with the moon, with the trees on the bank...

You become a mirror.

So you have to go into a new dimension: beyond being industrious. I am the lazy man's guide!

Industry is good if you are moving into the world. I teach how to be non-industrious. A perfectly balanced person will be industrious when he is working in the world, and absolutely effortless when he is moving inwards. And he will have a kind of balance; he will have both the capacities. He will not become attached to one alternative, he will be capable of shifting and moving easily. He can work, he can play; he can be hard, he can be soft. He can be as hard as a rock and as soft as water.

When these two things are together - when we have made the opposites complementaries in our being - we attain to the highest peak of synthesis.

I am not for the western way of life - it is too industrial - and I am not in favor of the eastern way of life - it is too introvert, too lazy... I am for a synthesis between East and West. And that's what is happening in this commune: people are working, but playfully; people are working, but work is worship. People are working but with a relaxed attitude and approach.

So this has to be remembered and this has to be learned - this is going to be your target: how to be effortless, how to just be.

[Premgit... Fall in love with life]

Life has to be a love song; if it is not, it is not life at all, it is only a slow death. It is dragging. One exists but one does not live. Life becomes a life only when your heart starts singing songs of love, when a poet is born in you and when a love affair starts with existence.

That's what sannyas is all about: it is a love affair with existence. It is not a philosophical effort to understand what it is all about, it is not a head trip. It is not trying to figure out the mysteries of life and existence - no, not at all. It is simply a love affair. We are not concerned with knowing what it is; we are concerned with living it whatsoever it is - XYZ. Our concern is to live it in its totality, because ultimately that is the only way to know it.

Hence, all creative activities are helpful: singing, dancing, music, poetry, sculpture, acting. All kinds of creative activities are good because they help your love energy to flow, your heart opens up more when you are creative. So whatsoever you do, do with the touch of creativeness. Innovate, bring something new into being.

It is not a question of whether you succeed or not; the only thing that is significant is that you tried.

Even if the song is never completed, it doesn't matter - you tried, and that's the real thing.

The very effort to transform your life into a song is the transformation. It is not a question of success and failure, achievement or non-achievement: it is not a competitive business. Even to fail on the way towards God is better than to succeed in the ways of the world. A love affair is a blind affair - love is blind, blind in the eyes of logic.

Just this morning I was talking about a saint, Paltu. He has a tremendously beautiful sutra. He says that only those who are blind will be able to understand what I am saying. It is far more significant than what Jesus says. Jesus says: If you have eyes to see, see; if you have ears to hear, hear.

Paltu seems to go deeper than Jesus. He says: Only those who are blind will be able to see what I mean. Although both mean the same thing; when Jesus says, if you have eyes to see, and when Paltu says, if you are blind, both mean the same thing. Jesus is not concerned with the so-called eyes with which we see the world; he also is concerned with the eyes of the heart, but the way Paltu says it is far more beautiful.

He says: If you are logically blind, if you are blind in the eyes of logic and intellect, only then will you have eyes of the heart to see. But he does not mention that - he says: Just be blind. That means, just be in love, and love is the only way to know God.

[Premrito... The difference between love and meditation is very delicate... ]

Not apparently visible, and as the ways come closer and closer to God, the difference is less and less. At the ultimate peak of experience when God explodes in you, all the differences disappear, but in the beginning they are all subtle differences.

On the path of meditation one has to learn how to be alone, and on the path of love one has to learn how to share and how to be together. On the path of meditation one has to forget the other.

The other contains the whole existence; all that is, is other, other than you. On the path of love one has to remember the other, care about the other, embrace the other, serve the other. It is an I-thou dialogue - love is a dialogue. Meditation is not a dialogue, because there is no other. Meditation is simply silence. Love is a song; it is full of silence, but it is still a song. Meditation is a silence; it is full of song, but it is still silence. Hence the distinction is very delicate.

But if one tries to watch, one can feel the difference. In love, you have to utterly lose yourself in the other - whatsoever the other is - so utterly that you are no more.

Looking at a rose flower, the meditator will look at the rose and remember himself; he will remember the looker. Slowly slowly the rose will fade away and only the watcher will remain. The meditator has succeeded in his work if the rose is completely forgotten. He starts with the rose and slowly slowly his consciousness shifts from the watched to the watcher, from the seen to the seer, from the observed to the observer. Slowly slowly the rose goes farther away, farther away, fades, and disappears. Only the witness remains, just the witness - nothing to witness: no content, only consciousness. That is the ultimate in meditation.

And the lover does just the opposite: looking at the rose he melts, evaporates. He becomes the rose. The rose becomes bigger and bigger and bigger. The rose becomes an ocean and the lover simply a dewdrop slipping from the lotus leaf into the ocean - going, going, going, gone! A moment comes when there is only the rose, there is nobody to witness it.

The lover has disappeared, dissolved, into the beloved. So both paths move in polar opposite ways, but the ultimate result is the same: only one remains - either the witness or the rose. But when only one remains, one has arrived. That one is called God, that one is called the truth. Your path is going to be love - hence the name....

Be here as long as possible and disappear!