Sipping tea can be prayer

A few things about sannyas.... The oldest concept of sannyas was very life-negative, it was utterly against life, but my idea of concept is absolutely life-affirmative. Nothing has to be dropped, everything has to be transformed. All that is available is immensely valuable: anything denied will never allow you to be whole, and if you are not whole you can never be holy.

So the old sannyas was an unholy sannyas: it accepted only part of life, it denied the remaining part. It accepted the mind, it denied the body; it accepted love but it denied sex; it accepted god but it denied the world... and they are all together. There is no demarcation between where the world ends and god begins. God is in the world, the world is in god. In fact these are two terms for the same phenomenon. Looked at rightly it is god, looked at wrongly it is the world. The world is only a distorted vision of god... but there is no other world! It is god reflected in a distorted mind. Once the distortion disappears and the mind is at peace, the world becomes divine.

So the old sannyas was an unholy sannyas because it never led anybody to the wholeness of life. It was very perfectionistic - I am not perfectionistic at all.

Perfection is a kind of neurosis. The moment a person tries to become perfect he is getting ready to enter trouble. He is bound to become more and more mad and he will lose all contact with real life.

He will start living an unreal life, the life of the ideals, which is just fictitious. And because of those fictions he will condemn himself because he will always feel he is falling short, that he is never up to the mark. So great guilt arises... and all the old religions have done that: they have created a guilty humanity. Rather than transforming humanity they have made humanity very poisoned.

They have not been of help, they have been of immense harm, and the fundamental harm is: if you can create guilt in a man, no more harm can be done. That is the last harm that you can do to a man. He will never be at ease with himself, he will never be at home with himself, and he will be constantly fighting.

Life is a mystery to be lived, a song to be sung... not a war to be fought. Life is not your enemy. You come out of life, you are part of it, it is your mother, and you will be going back to it.

So my sannyas is absolutely life-affirmative, hence it is wholistic rather than perfectionistic. I don't want you to become perfect human beings; they are bores. It is very difficult to tolerate a perfect man. Just be total and whole... that is very different. You can be whole right now, listening to me, you can be whole. Drinking water you can be whole if your drinking is total. Making love to your woman you can be whole if you are totally in it. Totality is not an ideal; it is not somewhere in the future to be fulfilled. Each moment of life it can be lived and can be lived very easily.

So, my sannyas is life-affirmative: I am utterly in love with life. It is non-perfectionistic, it is non-guilt- creating; it does not teach you to condemn anything in you or in anybody else. It makes you more and more aware of all the limitations of life and yet helps you to enjoy within all those limitations. They are there but there is no need to be worried about them... in fact those limitations are protections.

Let this sannyas be a great love affair with life itself... and there is no other god. If you can find life, you have found god....

Deva means divine, praghosh means a declaration - a divine declaration. And that's how each sannyasin has to be; but this is not to be an ideal! Each moment of life - cleaning the floor or taking a shower or just chit-chatting with a friend or sipping a cup of tea - ordinary things of life have to be declarations of god.

Yes, you can drink the tea in such a way that it becomes prayer, that it becomes a great gratitude towards god. And that is the meaning of praghosh....

So get in tune with the new name; let the old slip out of the mind. Sometimes miracles happen only by dropping the old name because our whole identity is attached with it. With the dropping of the old name, the whole past becomes irrelevant. You become discontinuous with it; you start from abc again. Now you will have to find out who this praghosh is. Again you will have to look, again you will have to search. The known, the familiar is no more there; you again become unknown. That's the beauty of the new name - it is a new beginning, a new birth.

[A sannyasin says that he's been doing Sufi mediations with Ilyat Khan for the past four years. Very good! says Osho, and suggests that he do the hypnotherapy group here. It will give you much clarity about what you have been doing, Osho says, because in the name of many meditations we are really using hypnosis. Once you consciously know that, things become different.]

Anand means bliss and maya means magic. And bliss is almost a magic - it is not a science, it is not even art; it is just magic.

If you want to be blissful you can be this very moment: just by desiring it, it is there. People are so miserable because they want to be miserable. That is their magical trick, that is the magic they are playing on themselves... notwithstanding what they say.

They may go to many people - to the psychoanalyst, to the guru - to find out ways to get out of their misery but they don't want really to get out of it, because if you want to get out of it nobody is barring the way. The door is open; you can simply get out! It is not even locked and nobody is guarding it; nobody is going to prevent you. It is your magic that you have played upon yourself. Misery is magic... so is bliss.

The day somebody understands it he can create his own reality. Then it is up to you: you can be blissful, you can be miserable, you can create hell and you can create heaven - whatsoever you want.

The word magic is meaningful. It is the oldest science in the world, and the people who lived with magical ideas were the liveliest people - the pagans.

Once this is understood - that we create our world, that it is our mind-projection, that whatsoever comes on the screen is projected by us - once this is understood, then there is no problem. If you want to see a horrible thing you can; that is your decision, your joy to see it.

That is the exact meaning of the word maya: that the world is magic - you create it. And everybody lives in his own world, it is not one world: fifty persons are sitting here, there are fifty worlds sitting here and each is living in his own world. We never come across each other's worlds but sometimes if we do, there is always clash. That's what happens in love: two persons come very close - their two different kinds of magic start clashing.

There are as many worlds as there are people - and when I say people I include the trees and the rocks and the animals and the birds, because they create their own magic! A tree lives in its own magic world.

This, rightly understood, becomes a great key, it becomes a great secret; then you can change and transform.

And my feeling is that you can do it very easily, that's why I am giving you this name. Start playing around with this idea. One morning, decide to be miserable... and be miserable! See how you can create it. Another morning decide that you are going to be happy and blissful, and create it. Within a month you will be surprised at how strange it is, that you can do it.

The day you create the blissfulness everything in the world helps your bliss, and the day you create misery everything in the world helps your misery. The world is always there to help you. God is always available; whatsoever you decide, he is ready to help you. He will not even prevent you from going into hell! That is the dignity of man, the freedom - if you want to go into hell you are free. He will not force you into paradise; if you choose on your own accord, that's good.

This is one of the very fundamental things: magic first came into the world, then it deteriorated into religion and then religion deteriorated into science. We are living in the most deteriorated concept of the world.

The people who had lived with magic were immensely powerful people because they were their own masters. Still a few primitive societies live in magic. In india there are a few primitive tribes in the dense forest and in the hills which live in magic still.

I would like you to become a magician - that's why I am giving you the name!

[A sannyasin had previously written to Osho saying that what Osho has shown him is so far beyond him, that he doesn't see how he can ever reach that point. Osho says, you miss the whole point if you make totality an ideal. The mind always wants more and that creates discontentment; don't try to be inhuman. It is not a question of being aggressive towards the beyond, Osho says - it is only a question of letting it happen to you. So rather than thinking how much more intensely you should work on yourself, think about how you can do it more relaxedly. Rather than asking for more, feel grateful for what has already happened.]

[A sannyasin, who has studied martial arts for many years, asks how he can develop the yin side of himself... the emotional side.]

Continue - I think it is perfectly good for you. The opposite can also be learned... and learning the opposite is of immense help because they are polarities. If you simply know the male energy and you don't know the female energy in your being, you are always half....

You have to know both. So there is no problem; it is simply a change of gestalt....

You can do both: you can learn feminine ways of being and you can learn masculine ways of being.

And by and by you will come to a higher synthesis of both, which will be neither masculine nor feminine - which will be a kind of transcendence. and that is the real point. Then you don't know who you are, man or woman, and that is a great experience when you don't know who you are. Then things start happening without any self-consciousness. You can forget all that you have learned and still nothing is forgotten.

The basic thing is the same, the secret is the same whether it is masculine energy or feminine energy. Once you have learned both you will come to know the basic secret - that the basic secret is not different.

It happened once that a great dancer came to a master....

The dancer wanted to learn swordsmanship, and the master looked at the dancer and he said 'You are trying to deceive me: you already know it!' The dancer said 'No, sir! I have never learned anything! I don't even know how to hold the sword.'

But the master wouldn't believe it; he said, 'No, I can see it. It is in your aura, it is in your energy.

Don't try to fool me. You know it!'

But the man denied it again and again. Then the master started thinking and he said? 'Maybe you are right but have you learned anything else?'

The man said, 'I am a dancer.'

And the master laughed. He said 'That explains it. If you have known the secret of dance you have known all secrets, because the secret is not different.'

In Japan they say: 'Even a man who knows the art of the tea ceremony knows all that martial arts can teach'... because the basic equilibrium is the same. You have come to a moment where you drop yourself, where you are in an utter let-go... when the sword moves on its own - you don't move it. It is exactly when the dance happens on its own, when you are nowhere to be found, when you are completely empty that something happens - out of that emptiness.

If the self comes in you are not a great artist yet: the self will be a disturbance. If the idea comes to you to protect yourself, to defend yourself, or to defeat the enemy, you are not a master yet. When no idea interferes - when you don't know who the enemy is, when the enemy is no more like the enemy because the self is no more there so the other cannot be there, when the self and other are lost - then there is something. That something can be found in many ways - feminine ways, masculine ways.

So learn both... and don't be puzzled, they are not opposites; they are complementaries. And by learning both you will come to a higher synthesis.

One can create a kind of dialectics in one's energy....

Dialectics means that you can use two opposites for a higher synthesis.

For example these two hands are opposites but they can be used to hold something.

Dialectics is when the thesis and the antithesis are used to create a synthesis, something higher than both - which is in a way the secret of both and yet beyond both.

Don't be worried about it, mm? continue... continue.