Darshan 13 July 1978
Prem means love, diwani means madness - love madness. And that's the only method to god. If one can be mad in love, then all becomes possible, because only in love are we not tethered to the earth. Suddenly the law of gravitation is replaced by the law of grace. We are not being pulled downwards, we are uplifted; hence the euphoria that love brings. Only in love does one disappear, and that's an absolute necessity for god to be.
When love is there, one is not; the lover and the love can't both exist together. If the lover is there, love is not, so whenever the lover comes in, love disappears. When the love is there, there is no lover - it is just a state. It has no centre in it, it is a centreless space. It has no ego, no self in it. It is utter selflessness.
And love is mad, because it goes against all calculations. It goes against rules and regulations. It goes against all rituals, formalities. It brings you back to your primeval state. It releases the wild energy in you. It breaks all the walls of civilisation that you have created around yourself or which the society has created around you. It is an explosion into wildness, into nature, but it goes so much against the reason, because reason iS a systematiser, a regulator, a controller. Reason does not believe in freedom; it believes in order.
Freedom is chaos. Of course the chaos has its own order but that is a totally different kind of order; it cannot be contained in the same word. Freedom has its own discipline but that is not a structure. It is a spontaneity; moment to moment it changes its colours, moment to moment it changes its song.
It is not pre-fabricated. And it is not responsible for anybody else except itself. It is responsive, but not responsible. It accepts the challenge of life, responds to it with totality, but not with already arrived at conclusions.
So love looks mad to reason, hence reason tries in every way to prohibit love, to inhibit love, to destroy it or to allow only the minimum.
My observation of people is this, that they allow not more than one percent of their love, hence they are so miserable. If they can still live with the misery, it is because of that one percent love that they allow. If that too disappears, then a man is ready to commit suicide; then there is no point to life at all. That one percent goes on giving the feeling of meaning. If one percent of love can give so much significance to one's life that one resists committing suicide, what will happen if one hundred percent of one's love is released? Then one will have life abundant, life eternal.
I am all in favour of the madness that love brings and the love that madness brings.
Prem means love, kabiro means god. God is love, and vice versa: love is god. They are synonymous - two words for one reality. God is the word of the theologian, love is the word of the poet, but the reality is the same - two words for the same reality. And certainly the poet's word is far better, because his understanding is deeper. The theologian's word can never have that depth, that profundity. He thinks about god - the poet feels.
Thinking is always on the surface; feeling, always at the very core of one's being. Thinking tries to prove. The very effort to prove shows that one has not known yet. In fact the theologian is not trying to prove the existence of god for others - others are just excuses; he is trying to prove the existence of god for himself. When he sees the conviction arising in others' eyes, he feels convinced that he must be right. But deep down there is suspicion, deep down there is doubt. He is trying to hide that doubt from himself. He creates many proofs, arguments, systems, to hide that doubt.
All the systems of theology only prove that the person has not known yet, because when you know, no proof is needed; knowledge is always self-evident. That's why the poet never gives any argument, his statements are non-argumentative. They are pure statements - he simply declares 'God is.'
And that is the difference between the western religion and the eastern religion: the western religion is too much in the hands of the theologian, hence they have killed it. God has been killed by the argumentative minds. They may be for him, that makes no difference - god is always killed by arguments; whether for or against it does not matter. In fact the man who argues against god may not be able to kill him, but the man who argues for him is certain to kill him!
The man who argues against god is really feeling a deep urge to trust and is afraid of trusting, hence he is arguing against. Mm? This is how life is so strange: the man who is an atheist is afraid of his trust, and the man who is a theist is afraid of his doubt. On the surface, the atheist seems to be doubting and the theist seems to be believing. Deep down just the reverse is the case.
But in the East religions have always been in tune with poetry. They have never argued. You will be surprised to know that in the East there exists no argument for god, as exists in the West - no arguments at all but simple statements. Just as the sun has set, just as there is noise on the road or the call of the cuckoo, or this silence, this-ness - exactly like that, they simply declare 'God is.' Love always knows without any knowledge to help it. It knows directly; its knowing is immediate.
Start by love and you will reach to god without any effort on your part. Do all that you can do to create love in your being and you will be rewarded by the experience of god.
Soham: It means 'I am that.' It is the greatest experience that is available to human consciousness:
'I am that, I am god.' It is not just a word - it is a tremendous, ecstatic experience. The word is simply symbolic. It is the greatest equilibrium and the greatest equation. The western approach has never come to this point, or only very rarely, and whenever some western mystic declared 'I am that', he was excluded from the church, haunted, tortured, burned. The church in the West has remained primitive. With all its sophistication and theological investigations and systematisations and rationalisations, it has remained primitive, non-democratic, and it has not allowed the mystic his full say.
When Meister Eckhardt said 'God is not - I am', the church felt offended. He was a very clever man - he died; otherwise the church would have killed him. He died in time. There are a few people who don't know how to live and there are a few people who know how to die and when to die! He died exactly in time... just a few days more and the church council was going to decide to exclude him from the church and to torture him, because it was sacrilegious to declare 'There is no god - I am god!' Had he been in the East we would have worshipped him as a buddha. He is one of the rarest flowerings in the whole history of humanity. Only a few people can be counted at that height, at that peak.
There comes a moment of silence, of such utter silence, that I and thou are no more separate; they are bridged, welded into one.
Martin Buber says the whole prayer consists of I and thou. This is not true. It is only the beginning, the abe of prayer, not the xyz of it. In the beginning the prayer is a dialogue between I and thou - the ultimate thou: god, existence, whole. But this is Just the beginning. When the prayer reaches to its crescendo there is no I found. And when there is no I, how can there be a 'thou'? Both disappear.
That disappearance has been coded into this small word: 'soham'.
This is the goal. This has to be achieved, this can be achieved. Without achieving it a man has not lived authentically, has not lived really, has wasted his energies, gone astray, become too entangled with the trivial, has lost his track.
Meditation is nothing but creating an atmosphere inside you where this feeling can arise: 'I am that' where this truth is heard, this still small voice is heard. That day is the day of greatest celebration when one hears that - not repeated by the mind t just an outpouring from nowhere. It simply arises from your own inner depths and overwhelms you. It is not that your mind says 'I am that' - your whole being, each fibre of your body, each cell of your body, your head, your heart, your guts, all are together in a kind of symphony and the experience is 'I am that.' Not inwards - it is a pure experience. One -knows it, one feels it, one is it; it is in one.
This is one of the greatest mantras, but a mantra that has to be heard existentially, not repeated.
Deva means divine, maya means illusion - divine illusion. The world is illusory, but it is still divine.
The world is a dream but a dream in the consciousness of god. Just as we dream in the night, the whole existence is god's dream; that is the meaning of maya. We are being dreamed by god, that's why we are. He is dreaming these trees and the birds and the stars and the people.
The word is of great potential; it can have many connotations. The English word 'magic' comes from the same root, because the magician creates things out of nothing, and that's how god creates things - out of nothing. Whenever you find any man who can create something, you will always find something of magic in that man. A painter with an ordinary canvas and colours creates something.
That something is not just the sum total of the canvas and the colours.
It happened once that a very very rich man asked Picasso to make a portrait of him. Picasso said 'But it will be very costly.' The rich man said 'You need not worry.' He was one of the richest men in the world, so the price was not fixed. It took six months for Picasso to complete the portrait and when the rich man came, Picasso asked a million dollars. Even the rich man said 'This looks a little too much and I don't see that just a canvas and a few colours can cost so much.'
Picasso said 'That's okay.' He told one of his disciples who was learning painting with him - 'Go inside, bring a bigger canvas than this, and bring many tubes of colours and give them to this man.
Whatsoever price he wants to pay, he can pay.'
But the man said, 'What will I do with the canvas and the colours?'
Picasso said 'That is the point - it is not just canvas and colours. Canvas and colours are only devices to make manifest something that cannot manifest by itself I am asking the price for that.'
All creation is out of nothing - it comes from nowhere, from the formless, and becomes manifest. So it may be a painter or a poet or a musician, but whenever you find somebody creative you will have the feeling of magic around him. He will have a magnetic force in him that attracts.
Maya is illusion but not just illusion; it is divine illusion. It has not to be renounced. It has to be lived it has to be lived in totality, because if you live the world in totality you will sooner or later stumble upon the creator of it. He is hiding somewhere here-in the trees, in the mountains, in the rivers.
If I can go deeper into your dreams, sooner or later I Will find you, because it is your dream - you muSt be there; without you it cannot exist. The dream may be a dream, a mere dream, but the dreamer is true. So I am all for living in the world need to renounce it. It is god's dream, true, but we can find god only through his dream. He has manifested himself in his dream, and the dream is beautiful, psychedelically beautiful; it is utterly beautiful. We have to dig deep into the dream to find the dreamer.
Psychoanalysis is on the right track - it analyses your dreams to know about you - and meditation is also is nothing but becoming aware of your dreaming mind. Slowly slowly, the more aware you become of the dreaming mind and the dreams that float in your consciousness and come and go, the more you become aware of the witness who remains. Dreams come and go - the witness abides.
Sometimes it is a beautiful dream and sometimes it is a nightmare, but the witness is the same. How long can you avoid the witness?
Sometimes one dream passes by, another has not come, and there is a gap; in that gap you will become aware of yourself. The psychoanalyst tries to analyse the dream from the outside; the meditator tries to become aware of his dreaming mind from the inside. Of course, the meditator goes far deeper because the psychoanalyst can only interpret from the outside. But the meditator can see it from the inside and the story is very different from the inside. The greatest experience comes when suddenly the gestalt changes. Remaining focussed on the dream, focussed, focussed, one day the gestalt changes and the focussing is on oneself.
The dream is no more there - only the dreamer is there in its purity.
That contentless consciousness is god. So you have a beautiful name - keep it!
[A sannyasin, who works in the ashram kitchen says: I can't get angry. Someone gets angry with me, then I get miserable and I start crying. People tell me not to take it seriously, not to take it personally, but it feels very personal. I get very upset.
Osho checks her energy.]
You have to express it. The problem is that you repress it. If it is there too much, just go to the therapy room, cry and weep and really get into it and enjoy it. Rather than thinking that you are doing something wrong, just let it happen. And don't try to be a witness; right now that is not the thing you can do. The first thing, before one can become a witness, is expression. With a repressive attitude nobody can become a witness, because it is almost impossible for them to be together.
You are trying to be a witness just to repress it. The first thing is to allow it expression... and enjoy it! Nothing is wrong in it....
Mm, nothing is wrong in it... nothing is wrong in it. You are not made of wood, that's all. And right now you need not be a wooden buddha! No. Be alive, and if you feel that it creates a scene there, then just go to the therapy room or go to the terrace and really have it. Within five to seven minutes it will be gone and you will come out of it very very clean, pure.
[The sannyasin says: Sometimes I go on crying all day!]
If you repress then it can happen. If you repress then it accumulates - if you have been repressing for many days then you cry for the whole day and then -it is heavy. Once in a while it is a beautiful thing. It is tiring if you have to cry the whole day, it is exhausting. But once in a while for five to ten minutes, one can cry and enjoy it. And one will feel bathed, clean, pure - the poison has gone out of the system. One will be more forgiving, more playful.
Just allow it. For one month allow it and then report to me, but nothing is wrong. Good!
[Osho gives a 'come close' energy darshan to a sannyasin.]
Things are good. Just a little fear is there, and fear is always a hindrance to opening up totally. But the energy is very good - if you can drop the fear completely, the lotus will bloom. But that fear is also natural; everybody has it. It is just to be on guard so that nothing wrong happens to oneself.
It is just out of the experience of millions of years that man has become very very frightened deep down, because anything can go wrong. So one keeps oneself shut, closed, unavailable, far away, distant, so that one can withdraw any moment if the need arises. One goes only so far and then one stops, waits, hesitates. This is natural but slowly slowly one learns that it is needless.
To be with a master and to be afraid is contradictory. Then you are not benefitted as much as you can be. To be with the master means to be absolutely vulnerable, to always be ready to die. Yes, exactly that, precisely that: to be ready to die. It is a process of death, but it prepares the path for the new to arrive. Death of you as you are becomes the work of that which you really are. But that is in the future. And to disappear feels frightening. The fear is so natural that one never feels it is there. It is so subtle and it has been always there, so one has become oblivious of it. People feel fear only when there is some extreme fear and very sudden.
One psychologist was experimenting: he dropped a frog into hot boiling water. The frog immediately jumped out of it. The same frog he dropped into ordinary water. The frog remained inside it. Then he started heating the water, slowly, slowly, slowly. The frog remained in it because the heating went so slow that he became adjusted to it, and when the water was boiling the frog was still in it, he wouldn't jump out of it; he died! He was capable of jumping out but the thing happened so slowly that he became accustomed to it.
So when there is some fear that grips you suddenly, you become aware of it. Somebody comes with a dagger and you become aware of it; the house is on fire and you become aware of it. But the fear I am talking about has always remained with you as a shadow, so much so that you have accepted it so you are not conscious about it, but I would like you to become conscious about it. I would like to see you after two months. Just remain conscious and relax more.
The energy is perfectly beautiful and ready to have a great jump, but the fear is hanging around it like a lodestone - it has to be dropped. Good!
[Osho gives a sannyasin a come close energy darshan.]
Things are getting better every day - just go on cooperating as you have been. But we have to go a long way yet. The journey has started and that is the most important thing; everything else is secondary.
The past goes only slowly slowly. It hangs around - it is like a hangover but it has no roots in you any longer... just a hangover, just the dust that clings to every traveller. The road is lost, gone, but the dust goes on clinging. It is just as if you have drunk too much in the night. Now you are not drunk but the hangover is there and you have a little headache and the body is feeling it, is a little hazy, foggy. But the root is cut, and even if the tree still looks green, it is not alive any more. It is dying.
And things are happening - just go on cooperating. In spite of yourself, go on cooperating!